


Rhapsody

by fetchmeabook



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Hallucinations, I also broke the doctor and will also fix her, I broke the master but i swear ill fix him, Post-Canon, Post-Episode: s12e10 The Timeless Children, doc is a softie, everyone get broken and fixed, fix-it?, shit gets real, the doctor being soft, the fam hate the master, the master is a romantic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-12
Updated: 2020-04-22
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:48:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 17
Words: 52,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23112718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fetchmeabook/pseuds/fetchmeabook
Summary: Three months, two weeks, four days, twenty-one hours, forty-three minutes and seventeen seconds.That was how long it was before Captain Jack Harkness had busted open the door to her cell, grabbed her hand, and told her to run with the sort of glee that she had told Rose many years ago.________After escaping the Judoon, the last person the Doctor is expecting to save is the Master himself.
Relationships: The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who), Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan)
Comments: 75
Kudos: 218





	1. Show Me

Three months, two weeks, four days, twenty-one hours, forty-three minutes and seventeen seconds.

That was how long it was before Captain Jack Harkness had busted open the door to her cell, grabbed her hand, and told her to run with the sort of glee that she had told Rose many years ago. He had found the Tardis what would have been two weeks after she had been taken but without knowing how to read the Gallifreyan that seemingly all the instructions were written in, it had taken a while for her to accept Jack as a temporary pilot until her Doctor could be found. Jack had stored the Doctor’s stolen ship within his own stolen ship and once she had come to accept that the Captain’s main prerogative was just to find the Doctor, the Tardis slowly began to let him in on some of her secrets. As she let him in more the closer he got to finding the Doctor herself, as Graham had pointed out to him. This was a regeneration he had to see, but Jack wanted to see every regeneration of hers in order to see if he would ever have a chance with her or him.

After three months, four days, twenty hours, thirty-seven minutes, and ten seconds he was finally allowed to put the Tardis into the vortex to find her missing pilot. Time in the vortex moved differently than time outside it so Jack wasn’t quite sure how much time had passed once he was there. He had never asked the Doctor, out of curiosity, how time in the vortex worked but he had a feeling that she had been through too much recently to not ask now. With the Tardis stopping on a Judoon prison ship the captain gladly stored away his idea of questioning the Doctor about time functions in the vortex. She was in more trouble than he had anticipated. 

In the three months, two weeks, four days, twenty-one hours, forty-three minutes and seventeen seconds since she had seen a familiar face it was almost to be expected that Jack would finally be the one to track her down. During that time however she had mulled over the revelations from the Master so many times that what he had shown her almost made sense. Almost. One could never be quite sure with him though, at the Academy he had a tendency to connect the dots prematurely and miss some information along the way. He could have easily done the same thing with what he saw in the Matrix. 

As each attempt she made at escaping the security around her cell was heightened, yet still they refused to tell her for what exactly she was being kept for. The walls had been littered with carvings and scratches in the writings of a thousand languages, the delicate whirls of circular Gallifreyan littered throughout, became her only form of escapism. With all that entailed, being a captive of the Judoon, the Doctor was kept only marginally sane by the thoughts and memories that she knew were her own. Both Jack and the Master had been placed throughout them to the point she thought she might have been hallucinating when Jack had finally arrived to her rescue. She, though too loath to admit it, had hallucinated him coming to rescue her when the security had become so tight that she would be left without food for days on end, maybe even once or twice she’d envisioned her beloved Koschei coming to her rescue. Not the Master, just Koschei. Maybe her sanity hadn’t entirely survived.

“Run!” He had told her, grabbing her hand. Jack quickly took in the cell of the Doctor finally witnessing the conditions at which she had been kept. The Master might have been the renegade timelord known for a path of destruction, but after seeing what had become of the Doctor’s mind on the walls of her cell Jack might have been inclined to rival the other’s work in her name. 

She had stumbled a few times and Jack had come close to catching her whenever it had happened had she not quickly found her footing as the pair ran back to when he had docked her beloved ship. Judoon footsteps could be heard following them as the pair picked up speed. Once they had reached the Tardis Jack ushered the Doctor in before running to the console himself. He made quick work of sending her back to where his ship was located. Jack looked back at the Doctor, finally getting a look at her latest regeneration and a female one at that. The torment and torture of the Judoon wore heavily on her frame, she was looking worse for wear by the moment. Without a second thought, the Captain went to the troubled Timelord and hugged her. She had all but melted into him. He could tell, just from her response, that this must have been the first friendly touch in a long time. Letting himself be her rock, even if just for a time, he stayed absolutely still. 

He had lost track of time really, was their time in the vortex, until he felt her head seemingly roll off the side of his shoulder as she fell almost limp against him. Anger boiled up in him towards the Judoon and what awful treatment they had given someone so dear to him. They had broken both the Doctor in what seemed to be, to a degree, both mind and body. Though, he knew that anger had to be set aside. Knowing that the Tardis cared greatly for her, Jack gathered up the now unconscious timelord in his arms and carried her to the nearest room that the Tardis provided. It was just a simple bedroom with dim lights and soft blankets, a warm aura that had not been present in her dark cell. He gently laid her down on the bed, careful not to jostle her too much out of fear of waking the obviously exhausted timelord. Staying down on her level, Jack could finally take in this latest regeneration’s look. Her blonde hair was fluffed up in a way akin to someone constantly running their hands along their scalp. There was a darkened smudge of something along her jaw on the right side of her face, just above a bruise that ran along her neck. The bruise did not, to Jack at least, look like one that was gained through some fun activities. There was also, what at least looked like, blood dried under her nails and the remains of bruising on her wrists. In her sleep she curled in on herself. Jack pulled up a blanket around her and she buried herself under it.

Jack returned to the console room and parked the Tardis as she rejoined his current ship. He debated for a short while just simply leaving and returning to the controls of the larger craft but could not bring himself to leave the Doctor alone. Jack knew that the Tardis had a mind of her own, he’d seen both her ninth and tenth regenerations talk to her as though she were listening and was also well aware of the fact that the ship would take the Doctor wherever they needed to be as opposed to where they wanted to go. Quietly laughing to himself, Jack was not surprised when he heard the engines start up again. The immortal was even less surprised when, sometime later, he opened the front doors and found that they had landed on the rift in Cardiff. To his guess, the Tardis did whatever it was the Doctor usually did when they had in the past purposely landed on this exact spot.

Since he had last encountered the Doctor, not one of her companions but the Doctor themselves, Jack had figured out how to track other ships using his own vortex manipulator. If it could track down the now vacant ship he had been using for a time, he figured he could use it to track the Tardis too. This time being able to track where the Doctor was and not just take a wild guess with machinery that he wasn’t entirely accustomed to. With the tracker set, mapping the Tardis’ movements to his vortex manipulator, he went back to where he had left the Doctor sleeping. Still sleeping beneath her blanket, Jack took a chair that he hadn’t noticed before close to her bedside and soon dozed off in it alongside her. His anger towards the Judoon and his warning about the Lone Cyberman could wait until another waking hour. 

Two days, nine hours, fifty-five minutes, and twenty-six seconds later the Doctor awoke. Buried deep in her subconscious she had been counting every second of every day since she had been taken to that Judoon prison, the constant counting continued one even if she did not realize it anymore. Begrudgingly she got up once the realization had set in that she was no longer in the Judoon’s prison but was aboard her own Tardis. Jack had come to her rescue. She hoped this was all real. Sometimes the hallucinations had been strong enough to trick her, she prayed to the gods she didn’t believe in that this was real though. One foot followed the other as she sat up and took in her surroundings. If this were one of her hallucinations then she had tried to escape again. The guards would be back soon if this wasn’t real. She left the room and walked to the console room. A cup of still steaming tea sat up on the console itself next to a note from Jack. The note told her to call whenever she wanted to talk, and that her phone had been found under the console pinned to one of the crystals. He wasn’t going to push her into talking just yet as he had learned long ago that that would get him nowhere. At the end of the note he acknowledged that he had gone to look around Cardiff as it had been a long time since he had been back and that he was well aware that she would likely be gone by the time he returned. Picking up the cup of tea she knew it hadn’t been long since he had left. And doing just as he thought she would, the Doctor left Cardiff for a place she hadn’t been in many, many years.

__________________

The air smelled of early spring and blooming flowers. Magnolias blooming all around her was a familiar time that took her back to when she had yet to become ‘the Doctor’. The small estate had been bought when she had been young and the thought of leaving the Academy had still been just a few years away. What must have been only two hundred years here must have been a good twenty-eight hundred for her since she had first arrived here. She still remembered the excitement that had captivated her, then him, when she had finally managed to convert enough Gallifreyan currency to future Earth in order to buy the place. Ushas had thought it was frivolous and unnecessary but Koschei gladly came with her whenever she’d visit to escape. Their own little place to study and experiment, away from the prying eyes of professors and far, far away from Gallifrey. For a time, it had been absolutely perfect. Occasionally she would come back and when she did she would usually update some part to be closer to what was normal for that Earth year, she had no intentions of updating anything right now. 

The sight of the front door was almost as welcomed as the sight of her Tardis, which was to be in the front yard for the time being. Old oak paneling and sturdy hardware much like her own room’s door aboard has a ship. It was still heavy to push open and inside still felt like home, as much as the Tardis did. When she had been younger it had amazed her that this simple house could feel like a home more than the Lungbarrow Estate, the only home outside of the Academy dorms, ever had. After closing the door behind her she made her way to the staircase that had always been a great place for watching the sunrise through the windows. She smiled to herself as she remembered a time when the Deca had followed both her and the Master to their escape and he had read aloud from a textbook as though it were a dramatic play pacing up and down the stairs. Her and Drax had both been lost themselves in laughter as they all had listened to him and his dramatics. 

She still wasn’t quite sure if she were hallucinating or not, had the guards finally given up on her and let her fall into the waiting hands of madness?

The was something that looked to be a pair of leather shoes covered in orange-red dust at the base of the stairs. She must have been hallucinating them. Making her way up the stairs she blinked several times looking for any other signs that she might be hallucinating. There was a hall at the top of the stairs that she had once used for laying out all of her notes on how to fly a Tardis when she had had to retake her exam on the matter. At one end, above the room downstairs with the window to watch the sun rise, had been the room she had chosen as her own long ago and the one at the other end had been Koschei’s. He had once said that if the sun were to rise on her then he would enjoy watching it set at night. The Doctor caught herself, before she went any further to her old room, thinking that she should go back and see if her Fam were alright. Two voices in the back of her head began an argument for and against the idea. She knew that at the moment she couldn’t trust her own mind and didn’t want to be a danger to anyone she cared about. Until it was safe for her to be around them she knew that she had to keep her distance from them. It pained her to think that they likely thought she was dead, but for now it was for the best. Gingerly she moved closer to her room and gently pushed open the door. The hallucinations must have gotten stronger. Had Jack really saved her? She didn’t know anymore. There might have been the remnants of the last sedative they had used on her in her system, that’s when the strongest of hallucinations came. 

A purple mass was draped over a chair with a blue and red plaid fabric laying on the seat. There was someone laying on her bed covered by the white comforter that her eleventh incarnation had loved so much. He should have been dead, but he wasn’t good at staying dead. Just as much as he was good at lying. None of this was real, this was a hallucination. She went to take off her own shoes then realized she only had socks on her feet. In all of her hallucinations she wasn’t wearing shoes. This wasn’t real. Without a second thought she placed her own coat over the purple mass. She quietly walked over to the side of the bed he was laying on, back facing the door but looking out the window if his eyes had been open. There was a familiar brown and blue pinstriped jacket held to him. This wasn’t real, none of this was real. Koschei had been sentimental about some things but the Master was never sentimental. That jacket was still in the Tardis where it had been hanging for many hundreds of years since she had hung it up since the last time she had worn it. The Master wasn’t sentimental, and this was a hallucination. She climbed into the other side of the bed. This wasn’t real. She knew that when she awoke she’d be on the floor of her cell as she always was when she came to from one of these. This hallucination quickly climbed the ranks of being one of her favorites, she could feel the softness of the sheets and the heat coming off the body next to her. None of this was real.

“Goodnight, Koschei.”


	2. Let Me Live

The cyberium was a force to be reckoned with, designed in such a way that once it had inhabited the host for long enough there was nothing left of it. What made up the former individual was gone and all that remained was a shell for the cyberium to exist within. 

An almost silent morning was what the Master woke to. With the cyberium still taking up residence in him, he was exhausted even though he had been asleep for what felt like was weeks on end. The room was still the same and the pink magnolias outside the window were still in bloom. He had thought he might have slept through an entire season at the rate of which the cyberium was burning through him. Fear, something this regeneration was lacking an abundance of, took hold of his hearts as the idea of becoming nothing took root in his mind. The cyberium had been methodically chipping away at the Master, the villain that lurked in his head, but he had kept the lover Koschei locked away and safe. Fear told him that once the mindset of the Master was finally destroyed then Koschei would be new and there would be nothing left of him. All that would remain, as he had learned from the cyberium, would be a regenerating shell for an entity that meant destruction. 

There was a gap in his memory of something almost recent, or maybe it wasn’t recent, he didn’t know. There was a Gallifreyan collar, like the pompous ones the High Council would wear, and also cybermen; they both meant something, but he couldn’t piece together what they meant. He knew nothing was burning but he could smell the cooling remains of fire. His mind conjured up an image of a cage, no two cages, one small and bird sized another made of lights. Suddenly becoming younger and a girl named Nyssa, he felt like there was a wish in there somewhere. There was a sign that appeared in the corner of his eye, something about voting for Saxon? An American accent and an ostentatious cape dressed for no occasion. A women with a Scottish accent whispered in his ear “since he was a little girl.” There was a red cape, and something called an Azal. Another cyberman and a woman with sad brown eyes wouldn’t leave him. The end of a regeneration cycle and someone being left in a rotting decrepit state. Another person saying, “a cosmos without the Doctor scarcely bears thinking about.” Was that himself that said that? What felt like a gunshot hit his abdomen. He was frozen in place. Taking over a government was a blonde man, had he been Saxon? Someone, a very young boy, called him Koschei and told him they were going to be late for class.

Was this all him? Had someone decided to torment him with someone else’s memories? At the end of it all there was one voice left repeating over and over again the same four words.

You are not alone. You are not alone.

His hearts were hammering, and breathing was becoming difficult. A panicked state was beginning to set in. The cyberium had sunk into his memories and was treading them apart one by one, was the Master gone now? Had it moved on to destroying Koschei already? Without thought to anything else, he rolled onto his back. A cold body was next to him. It wasn’t cold as though it were dead, but it was quite chilled for someone who was alive. They didn’t move but he could see breaths in the movement of their chest. They looked like his Theta only this one was female. He reached out and brushed a lock of hair away from her closed eyes and felt a wave of familiarity wash over him. Was this Theta or someone else? He knew that he must have known her from somewhere, but he couldn’t quite place where. The woman hadn’t been here when he went to sleep, so she must have come here after. Two other names rattled around in his head, Ushas and Millennia. Maybe the woman was one of them. He’d have to wait and ask once she had woken up too. But maybe she wasn’t. She looked gentle but when he thought of the two names he also saw blue hair, maybe she wasn’t one of them. A woman named Lucy had had blonde hair. He looked at her and thought that maybe she was Miranda, he didn’t know who Miranda was but maybe she was this mysterious individual. 

The panic had begun to settle and once more everything became foggy in his head. He could feel the cyberium getting back to work at unraveling more of himself. There was a protective instinct that he knew had belonged to Koschei that flared up. He threw his arm over the woman and pulled her closer to him. The thought that he didn’t know who she was but that he had to keep her safe was something that loomed over his mind heavily. There was the scent of stale recycled air on her hair mixed with the light cotton of the sheets on the bed. Underneath all of it was something that reminded him of homecoming, of something he had always known to be present in his life yet however was tainted with a soured memory. What that memory was he could not tell, maybe the cyberium had already destroyed that piece of him. The exhaustion began to overtake him again as the cyberium continued its work. Whoever this woman was, she was safe and she was home. She was warm, despite her chilled skin. And, above all else, she was someone that Koschei had known which meant that she had to be good. 

If his head hadn’t already been laying on a pillow he would have collapsed into it involuntarily. With eyes fluttering shut, sleep overtook him once more. 

_______

The Doctor wasn’t sure if she had ever truly slept during one of her hallucinations. She had closed her eyes and could trick herself into feeling relaxed in them, but had she ever truly found rest in one? Could someone sleep during a hallucination? Her eyes would not allow her to open them to find out. There was a warmth surrounding her and a dark presence that had settled over her breaking mind. The wall furthest from the door to her cell had always been warm, despite facing out to deep space. And no matter how much she tried to block it out, there was always a dark presence in her cell. Isolation and maximum security would always feel like that. She would rather have been in Stormcage than her cell, at least she could have possibly seen River then. She curled into the warmth and slipped back under sleep’s gentle spell. 

________

Waking again, if only briefly, the man who was losing himself found that the blonde woman had curled up closer to him. Suddenly anger ran through his veins, hot and vengeful. Someone had done something awful to her and he would make whoever it was pay. Their name sounded like it started with a Tectonic? Tzofia? Tecteun? Tahkara? Tequila? Terpischore? Whoever they were, and he thought that that individual was a woman, he needed to destroy this one individual for this woman that was now curled into him. She had been wronged and hurt in a vile and cruel way and he could not stand the thought whatsoever. He swore to himself that he would protect her no matter the costs.

Despite feeling cold, she was warm and warmth was what he wanted most in all of the known universe right now. He held her tighter and closer to him as he allowed sleep to overtake him once more.

_______

Neither one could tell how long they had been asleep individually or collectively. The sun was just rising when the Doctor woke to see a loving look from the eyes of a man who had destroyed her home planet. There had been times in her cell that she had wished he would drop the cold and tormented persona of the Master that had long since drowned out loving and brilliant Koschei. She tried to push away from him but found that his arm was laying across her waist. Once she had managed to throw his arm off the Doctor scurried off the bed and took an almost defensive stance on the other side of the room. As she moved away he sat upright to look at her. The darkness that had long since accompanied his presence could still be felt. An almost confused expression crossed his face, to the Doctor the look was startlingly out of place. The confidence and smug expressions that followed the Master through each of their regenerations had vanished since she had last seen him. At this very moment she almost wished for them to return. 

As she closed off her mind from his she felt a wave of uncertainty come off of him. Accompanying the darkness was a desperate feeling, like the ones that individuals emitted when they were begging to live. The Master was not one to die and stay dead so the feeling that part of their mind was calling out begging for life was unsettling to say the least.

From her corner the Doctor demanded, “What are you doing here? It’s been centuries since you’ve come back here. Why now?”

He dropped his head and in shaking words he responded. “I know you- “

“Well of course you know me,” she interrupted.

“But I don’t know who you are.”

He looked up at her as though he was expecting her to interrupt him. When she didn’t he continued on. She sent a confused look towards him. “I don’t know what this place is or how I ended up here. All I know is that it felt safe. Someone I loved visited here or lived here, I don’t know, but maybe they’ll come back.”

To her he sounded like a little child that had been abandoned and was waiting for their family to return. This wasn’t the Master. He looked like him and sounded like him, but this wasn’t him. This regeneration had already played the ‘I’m not who I said I was’ scheme on her once so he likely wouldn’t do it again. Had he put himself in the chameleon arc to pass off as human? If there was one thing that she would always find useful that she had learned from her time at the Academy it was that if she listened close enough, through a subconscious psychic connection, then she could hear his hearts beating. She forgoed responding to him for a second in favor of listening, almost hoping she’d hear the beat of a single heart. 

1-2-3-4 1-2-3-4

The heartbeat of a timelord was still there.

“What are you playing at, Master?” After spending three months with the Judoon, the Doctor was in no mood to play his silly little games. 

“What do you mean?” His eyes went wide and the look of confusion returned. She could visibly see that he had begun to breath heavier. When they had been younger, every so often the drums would get to be too much and he would go into a panicked state on the verge of breaking down. It would look much the same as he did now. Part of her, Theta who had long since lived in the furthest reaches of her mind, wished to go to him and hold him close and tell him everything would be alright. The larger part of her however was what won out. It was the part of her that had become indifferent towards the Master, the side of her that refused to ever listen to him now after all his lies and the ever-growing destruction he left in his wake. 

The Doctor only moved forward enough to grab the coat she had laid it on the chair. Now she could very audibly hear his breathing. “After what you’ve done, are you expecting my sympathy?” She felt like she was being cruel, leaving him in a panic like this. But, she was, as Ryan had once said, ‘done with his shit.’ As she closed the door behind her she could hear his walls break even further and his mind reach out for someone, anyone, to help him and let him live. The Doctor stayed outside the door choosing to sit on the floor with her back to it. If he was really a danger to himself, or something devastating had happened, there wasn’t a need for him to play games like this. Though it pained her to admit it, she would still come back to the Master if he ever needed her help.

Through the door came a broken and desperate voice that caused the Doctor to close her eyes and allow a tear to escape. He didn’t say it, but she could hear the pleas for help in his voice.

“Do you know who Theta is? Can you find him? He was always safe, please can you find him?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are so many references in this that if you caught all of them I love you. Just so you lot are aware, my state has been put on all but official lockdown so I'll probably be updating this frequently. Also, both the title and chapter names are Queen songs...keep 'I Can't Live Without You' in mind.


	3. I Can't Live Without You

Her predecessor’s words to her rang in her ears. Never cruel, never cowardly. She was being both at the moment. There was something direly wrong with the Master and she had not only left him alone but had ran away. Mind you she hadn’t run far, she had only returned to her Tardis, but nevertheless she had run. Missy’s voice joined in and reminded her ‘it wasn’t me who ran, Doctor, that was always you.’ The Doctor stood at her console, hands pressed to it but with her head hung as though sham were setting in.

“When someone needs help I never refuse.”

She had confirmed for herself that this wasn’t a hallucination, that this was real. Her shoes never made an appearance in any of her hallucinations, not on her feet or left about, but they were seated at the foot of the bed that Jack had left her on. The man back in that house was the Master but he also wasn’t. Something was very wrong.

She dragged her hands down her face. “I can’t live with you but I also can’t live without you. Why is it that you have always been this ever-present conundrum in my life.” If there was one thing she had managed to get from her time in the Judoon prison, it was that until otherwise acknowledged, she was loomed to the House of Lungbarrow and at the age of eight began attending the Academy with a boy that would always follow her throughout her life. Now was not the time to acknowledge what he could have misinterpreted. 

The pacing around the console itself was a subconscious action. “You’re asking for Theta, not the Doctor. I haven’t been called that in so many years, but you’re asking for Theta and looked at me like you didn’t know who I was.” There was a war beginning to brew within herself. She gathered herself together again and left her Tardis, this time with her shoes on. Once she was back inside the house the Doctor took in her surroundings just to gage how long he might have been here. The first room she checked was a library. It was small in comparison to the one in her Tardis and miniscule compared to the one at the Academy, Millennia had once stated that it was “adorably sized.” Each member of the Deca had kept a book here to mark how many times they had visited, and to keep track of when they needed to return to the Academy. Her own book had been a little leather one that had at one time been green, given that it could now be categorized by human standards as being ‘ancient’, she wasn’t sure how much of the color had remained. Koschei had always kept his book near hers. By comparison, his was much softer with its worn in cover and almost thread bare binding. 

As her fingers danced across the various book spines the Doctor thought to herself that this must have been ridiculous, looking for the book they all used to log their visits in. If the Master had been in his current condition when he had arrived he wouldn’t have been in the right state of mind to log his arrival here. Instead of continuing her search, the Doctor moved on from the library and returned to the hall she had previously left. If her memory was serving her well there was a coat closet that was not far from her. During the times that the entire Deca would visit as an escape from their studies, they would have a tendency to rebuild certain parts of the house for fun. Moving the coat closet was something that they did frequently, even if just to mess with each other. Last she had seen it, when she had visited while leaving Nardole to watch over Missy in the vault for a time, the closet had been tucked away near what was once a “kitchen”. The Deca collectively had accidently, or purposely a few times, set the room on fire so many times that it could likely not be called a kitchen any more and more so a fire hazard room instead. If there was one thing that you never learned at the Academy or on Gallifrey in general, it was how to cook. That was one of the many things that had made the planet unappealing to travelers, not that anyone would actually wish to visit anyway. 

In the closet the Doctor found a few rather peculiar things. The first being the purple jacket that she knew Missy had sported as well as the black and red asymmetrical coat that the Master’s previous incarnation had worn. ‘Had the Master chosen to sleep off their recent regeneration here in the same way she attempted to stay near her Tardis?’ She wondered. The Master wasn’t sentimental, Koschei was but their new persona never was. While she continued to wonder if it was for sentimental reasons or not, the Doctor had at least established that the Master did come here at least twice “recently”. In the very back of the closet a beam of light got caught on a red and gold piece, at some point in the past the Rani had been here too. With a slight smile on her lips, the Doctor closed the closet door and headed to where she had seen his shoes when she had first arrived. The burnt orange dirt of Gallifrey was still sitting on them. Around them was a faint ring of dust as though they had been sitting there for quite a long time. If there was one thing that the Master always did it was dress to the nines, baring his stint as the ‘King of the Wasteland’, and shoes were always included. If they had been sitting there for long enough to accumulate dust around them then something had to be extremely wrong with the Master. There was not a single incarnation of them that the Doctor could think of that could sit still or me in one place for too long. She had constantly heard Missy pacing in the vault or had had to hear of Nardole complain that she was moving about. The Doctor and the Master might have fought frequently, but the former never liked the thought of something being wrong with the latter. Between the dust and the way his mind called out in its broken and helpless way, the Doctor couldn’t bring herself to leave him. 

“If there’s one thing I’m certain of, when people need help I never refuse,” she had told Graham and Grace not long after she had met them. And the Master was the one who needed help right now. The thought of her saying that reminded her that she should, at some point, at least make her companions aware that she’s not dead. But, her mind wasn’t in the right place yet and they wouldn’t be accepting of the Master being around them. Yet again she had to set them aside for a bit.

______

He was asleep when she returned, restless but asleep nonetheless. Tear tracks were present on his cheeks and his hair was a mess. He had pulled the sheets up around him like a caterpillar making a cocoon but the corner of the comforter was trapped in his grip, even in his sleep his grip on the fabric turned his knuckles pale. Cautiously, the Doctor moved closer to him. As gingerly as possible she turned his wrist over and gently pressed her fingertips into his wrist to release his grip on the comforter. To her surprise his entire arm went lax in her hand. She could feel his mind trying to reach out to her, calling for someone to help. Unlike him, she wasn’t one to barge into people’s minds uninvited, but the way the broken parts of his mind called out shoe couldn’t refuse to help. And the only way to begin to help was to see what kind of a state his mind was in. She took a deep breath in. 

“I’m sorry, Koschei, truly I am.”

Sitting down on the side of the bed she had earlier occupied and he instantly curled into her as though she was protecting him from something. At the Academy there had been a number of nights in her early days there where she had curled into him the very same way. She laid a gentle hand on the side of his temple and opened her mental link and mind to him. For someone with as strong of barriers as him she was not prepared for what she felt. For many years his end of the bond had been long silent, even as she held him and begged both mentally and verbally for him to regenerate on the deck of the Valiant he was silent, but now his mind was wide open. All his reservations were obsolete. What had once constructed his mental walls now lay in ruin and rubble, as destroyed as he had left their home planet. She could feel something fighting back her presence, something that was not part of his mind but still in him. At the Academy she and him had spent more time in each other’s minds than their own, she knew exactly what his mind felt like and how it reacted. She pressed in on the foreign piece residing in his mind and felt as it locked away and destroyed various memories. When it became defensive of itself is when it finally felt familiar to her. Though for a short time, she had been a host for the cyberium. Its cold and defensive existence overtook corners of her mind and she made sure to remember how it had felt. The Master had willingly taken the cyberium in him and now it was destroying him from the inside out. Knowing that a quick retreat from his mind would not only cause the cyberium to become more defensive but it would also bring immense pain to an already broken Master. So, for his safety she made a slow and deliberate retreat. Once she was back in her own mind, however, she did not close the link to his incase the cyberium decided to take drastic measures and destroy his mind quicker than it had already been doing. 

As he lay there, head practically in her lap, she carded her fingers through his hair and lost herself in thought. No, he was not a hallucination. He was here beside her and needed her help. He needed her, and though she’d loath to admit it, she needed him too. Her own healing could be set aside for a while, right now what she needed was him. Whole and as unbroken as possible.

______

After she had separated herself from the Master, the Doctor set to work. While at the Academy they had been given an assignment in one of their classes that instructed them all to give a biosignature to a mundane object. Koschei, thinking he was being funny, had chosen a little glass jar that he had acquired during one of his trips to Earth. Long after the assignment was returned to him he had brought it to his room in the house knowing that any of the other members of the House of Oakdown would have done away with it, it being an Earth object and quickly linking it to a young Theta Sigma Lungbarrow. Though their families had, begrudgingly, allowed the two run about when they were young as the pair grew older the animosity between the two houses grew no matter how the boys had felt about one another. The Oakdowns had always been aware of the Lungbarrow boy’s ardent fascination with Earth. Koschei had made sure that they never knew of this place. 

Making her way to the other end of the hall, to the room Koschei had long ago claimed as his own, the Doctor set about finding the little jar with its biosignature. If she remembered correctly, and it had been many centuries since she had last seen it, the jar had had a little gold lid that had red and orange ribbons tied around it. Koschei had had some reasoning for why he had tied those ribbons there but she had long since forgotten what it was. His room at the Academy had always looked as though a storm had passed through it, destroyed and books laying everywhere. He had always claimed it was easier for him to visualize everything, so naturally the Doctor assumed that his room here would be just as messy. And it was, just not the same kind of mess. Whereas he would have textbooks and essays strewn across the floors there, here were books and pages of sketches. Koschei had always been creative, it made sense that the Master had been so innovative and imaginative in their destruction. It had stemmed from art. While in school, the Doctor had always seen him drawing on corners of pages but he would never let her see those images as he snapped books shut and turned over papers just as she got a glance. While she carefully stepped about the room to grab the little jar that she had noticed was sitting on a bedside table, she took a look at the drawings all around her. It was then that she had realized that a number of them were her in her various different incarnations. At that moment she wanted nothing more than to stay and look at every single sketch, to see their subjects and to beholden to even the smallest of details in them, but she knew that she couldn’t right then. She had to bottle up and set aside her own mental state at the moment to help her broken friend and she would have to bottle up her curiosity to look through everything too. 

Part of her, however, thought that looking through all of the sketches would be more intrusive than looking into his mind uninvited. His mind, though beautiful and brilliant, was his hearts but these sketches, what he had obviously put so much work into, was a window into his soul. The soul was much more personal and infinitely more intimate.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love description and knowing what exactly something looks or feels like, hence the intense amount of description. Also, if you can't tell yet I don't have things beta read. I just write, post, and hope for the best.
> 
> Next hint is: Keep Yourself Alive by Queen


	4. Keep Yourself Alive

With the jar in hand, the Doctor closed the door to Koschei’s room behind her. A part of her wanted to bring a blank book from the room to him for whenever they had finally separated the cyberium from him but she felt like that would require her to look through each book to find a blank one. The voice in the back of her mind stopped her and told her to let the Master show her his works on his own accord, it would be more personal that way too. All she had seen on the floor had been charcoal and ink line sketches so she had wondered if the Master had any other works in different mediums hidden elsewhere. While his earlier incarnations had always dawned a classic black and white ensemble, more recent ones had been incorporating more colors regularly. Rich crimsons with deep violets and unending blues, while still dark colors they were without a doubt beautiful.

When the Doctor stepped back into the room that had once been hers, or was still hers to an extent, she found the Master still curled up soundly on the bed where she’d left him. The Doctor wished there was a way to remove the cyberium from him and allow him to continue slumbering away but seeing as it had a hold on his mind there was only but so many ways that it could be removed. The first of which was the trick that she had used on Shelly and it was just as bad on the individual it was performed on as the one doing it. Second trick was the one she herself had used when she had hosted the cyberium for a short amount of time. Sadly, both options required the individual hosting the cyberium to be awake for the duration of the process. The Master had never been one to enjoy waking up, the Doctor was well aware of this fact as it never changed from regeneration to regeneration. If it had been up to them, they would never have to wake up willingly and would spend their days sleeping and their nights wide awake. Laying a gentle hand on his shoulder she lightly shook him awake. With how broken his mind was at this point she hadn’t realized how terrified she was that he might not have woken up. Seeing those beautiful brown eyes look up at her she let out a sigh of relief. “Is it morning already?” He asked her like Koschei would when they were young.

The Doctor looked outside, “Yes.” In reality it looked to be early in the afternoon. “If you’ll let me help you, there’s something that we need to get out of you.”

“You can have my spleen, I don’t like the color of it.”

His words sounded more disjointed than they had previously, now the Doctor was getting quite worried. “I need you to relax your mind, no thoughts at all. Do you know what the cyberium is?”

“I was willing but I shouldn’t have been.”

The Doctor took this as her answer, the Master had willingly taken the cyberium into himself hence why it was becoming defensive of its host. The cyberium thought that the Master was willingly becoming a shell for it to exist. While many of the Master’s incarnations had a strong death wish, this one included, this was not a way they would have wanted to meet death- that much the Doctor knew. “The cyberium is trying to destroy you-.”

He sounded panicked, “You have to find Theta then, Theta will be able to get rid of it.” With a delicate and soft smile, he said, “Theta was always able to figure out the difficult things better than me.”

Almost choked up, the Doctor tried to respond with, “I promise you we’ll find Theta but right now we cannot wait for him. The cyberium is trying to destroy your mind and you’ll want to remember Theta when you see him next, right? Then we have to get it out of you as quickly and as soon as possible. So please, would you relax and clear your mind of everything? The cyberium will react as though you have fallen brain dead and will need to seek out another host. It will leave you and then we can find your Theta.”

“Have you met my Theta?” The Master was beyond delirious now. With the cyberium in defensive mode and trying to destroy the Master’s mind even faster now, the Doctor had to act quickly.   
“No,” the Doctor lied. “Why don’t you tell me about them?” She was busy rearranging everything in the room, him included. This was in a precaution to force the cyberium into the jar once it had finally let go of the Master. 

He was sitting upright now, back against the headboard with the sheets and comforter pulled up high. “We went to school together, I met him on the first day.”

“Is that so?”

“He was always so smart, and funny. My mother and father didn’t like him though, they said that we Oakdowns were better than the Lungbarrows and associating with one of them was social suicide. The more they told me to stay away the closer I ended up.” The Master’s voice got quiet. “He ran away though.”

“From his family?” The Doctor already knew why he had run away then, but she just needed to keep him conscious for now. After the cyberium was out of him and trapped in that jar then he could lose himself to sleep once more.

Hearing him say, “No, from me” was not the answer the Doctor had been expecting. With wide eyes, he shook his head and told her, “I didn’t mean to fall in love with him. I just did and it scared him away.” 

She could feel all the air in her lungs escape her all at once, “Did you ever tell him that you loved him?”

“Once and then he went and married some woman instead of me.” The melancholy was abundantly present in his voice. “No matter what I’ll always love him though, my Theta. I still love him, even now.”

The Doctor forced herself to respond despite finding out that the Master had been in love with her to the point that he had wished to marry her and was still in love with her, even now. Though she was unsure if this was the cyberium talking for him or if in this broken down state he was just being brutally honest with her. Nevertheless, she tried to mask her shock. “Well I’m sure if you tell him once you see him again he’ll be more accepting. Now let’s fix you up, alright?”

In a childlike manner he responded, “And then we’ll find Theta?”

She hadn’t heard him sound so childlike and full of hope in so many years that it nearly floored her, “Then we’ll find Theta.” In an effort to hide her own whirlwind of thoughts and emotions she smiled at him and took a seat beside him on the bed. Once again he curled closer to her. There was a pain in her chest, an emotion based one as opposed to a physical one, that this kind hearted and childlike behavior had been brought about by the cyberium melting his mind away and that none of this was real. That once the cyberium was out of him and he recovered he’d go back to the angry and vicious nature she had previously seen in this incarnation. “Can you close your eyes for me and relax?”

He leaned his head against her shoulder and did as she had asked. Without prompting, she could feel him clear his mind through their bond. She opened the little jar of Koschei’s and waited. And waited and waited. They waited for three hours before the cyberium finally began to let go of the Master’s mind. What the Doctor hadn’t anticipated was the pained screams that came from him and for all the energy in his body to dissipate once the cyberium had left him. He went lax against her and the headboard, a dead weight against her. With him in an unconscious state she forced the cyberium into the jar and sealed it tight once it was inside. Now began the long and arduous task of piercing the Master back together. For a moment she set the jar down on the table beside the bed. Rising from the bed she resituated the Master, covering him up and checking his mind to make sure that all remnants of the cyberium were gone. The first thing she checked for, however, was to see just how long he would be asleep for and with his mind in the state that it was she was sure he would not wake for many, many hours to come. However, that was not all that she was looking for. With the cyberium vacant from his broken mind the Doctor was greeted by an even more heartbreaking mental landscape. His mind did not resemble that of the Master or Koschei but instead someone who had had their mind erased with only fragments left. She hadn’t been a host to the cyberium long enough to know what it would do with a broken mind but she hoped that there was still enough left that eventually the Master would return, deep down she wished that Koschei would return and not his menacing persona. 

She drew the curtains on the window to darken the room before heading to leave the room. “Sweet dreams, Koschei. I’ll be back before you wake.” With that she closed the door behind her. The Doctor took the jar with her as she ventured deep into the Tardis to where she had once stored the Carrionites. The cyberium would be kept alongside the other dangerous pieces, or entities, she had come across in her travels. 

Once the Doctor had dealt with the cyberium she went in search of a sensor that could notify her of when the Master was nearing waking up. The one she was looking for was a little silver thing, inconspicuous and unless you knew what you were looking for it was unassuming. For some odd reason she found it in one of the Tardis’ kitchens in a teacup of all places. Until told otherwise, it would be Jack’s fault that it was there. The sensor was already connected up to the Tardis so the Doctor had not worried about doing that, she then returned to the house with it in hand. Seeing as the Master hadn’t moved so much as a muscle in the short while that the Doctor had been gone, she set the sensor down on the table and moved closer to him. While she felt it might have been a touch creepy to admit to watching him in his sleep, it wasn’t often that the Doctor could truthfully say that the Master looked entirely at peace. She brushed aside a lock of his hair that had fallen across his closed eyes and sorted away the image in her memory. At the Academy, morning Koschei had always been her favorite to interact with. 

The Doctor then returned to her Tardis and set about doing something that she figured wasn’t her best choice at the moment. As much as she always loved being one to help the Master, he was asleep and would be for the foreseeable future and she could not trust herself to be alone in her own head. She desperately needed someone to talk to, which was something she would never admit to aloud. The time in Sheffield was only quarter to seven, it wasn’t too late there. Right then she just needed to see her Fam, even if she knew she wasn’t in the right state. She could feel herself beginning to break down and in the past, during the few times it had happened, she would shut herself away. Right then she felt that if she did that it would be doing more harm than good. Slowly she moved to the console of her Tardis and set the familiar Sheffield coordinates. It took less time to move across space than it did to move across time so the Tardis arrived at the chosen destination, with no arguments, in little time. The Doctor took a companion to the sensor she had left with the Master and exited her Tardis. Little did she know that the Tardis landing had been heard by someone familiar to her, someone she welcomed seeing.

“Doctor!” A voice yelled and before the Doctor knew it she was being engulfed in the arms of one Yasmin Khan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's only day 2 of quarantine and I can already feel myself going stir crazy. Honestly I am thriving on comments right now because that is one of the only forms of human contact I've been allowed at the moment. My house is on complete isolation right now.
> 
> New hint is another Queen song, You're My Best Friend


	5. It’s a Hard Life/You’re My Best Friend

The Doctor couldn’t remember Ryan and Graham showing up. She couldn’t remember them deciding to take her back to Graham’s home since it would have been the quietest place at the moment. Could she remember someone sitting her down on the couch they had placed her on when she’d been in her regenerative coma? No. And there was no memory of when the hot cup of tea had been placed in her hand. There wasn’t much the Doctor didn’t remember. That was a lie, if what was in the Matrix was true then there was a lot she didn’t remember. Suddenly she felt herself breathing fast and heavy with the cup of tea being taken out of her hand. She could hear it being set down on a table nearby. Arms came up around her and held her tightly. If it wasn’t for a thumb being run across her cheek, the Doctor wouldn’t have noticed the tears that had escaped. Someone was rubbing soothing circles into her back as she pressed her face into the shoulder of whoever was hugging her. At this moment her humans felt almost as much like home as the Tardis did, and as Koschei once had.

Koschei was home. The Tardis was also home. Gallifrey had once felt like home. But now home is gone. When he looked at her he didn’t know her, the Tardis wasn’t with her, and Gallifrey was rubble. With that realization the Doctor could feel the damn break and every emotion she had been trying to repress for so very long made its long awaited appearance. There was anger and hatred and despair but also joy and happiness and, most importantly there was, love. Her anger for the situation she had never had any say in being placed into. Hatred for the laws of Gallifrey and the classist ways of their great houses. Despair for the life that she wanted but never could have had. Joy for exploration and freedom. Happiness was reserved as the feeling for seeing any of her companions interacting with a new world for the first time. And, love, the kind that clouded all other feelings and made you do stupid things, that kind of love was reserved for only one individual. And, he was gone. If there was one thing that the Doctor was never prepared for it was the emotions that coincided with a breakdown. It wasn’t often when a breakdown would happen but when they did the emotions were absolutely debilitating.

The Doctor was grateful that none of her companions were forcing her to talk at the moment, they simply sat silent and provided comfort just by their presence. They were all worrying, their thoughts and emotions too loud for her not to notice, as they had been for a while. That morning none of them had expected to witness the bright bubbly Doctor that they all loved break. It was Yaz’s arms that had come up around her and held her tight, by extension it was also her shoulder that the Doctor had buried her head in. Ryan stood nearby, unsure of what exactly to do, and Graham was sat on the other end of the sofa rubbing circles in the blonde woman’s back. It was a long while before the Doctor had calmed down enough to be present for her companions. All were practically on the edge of their seat waiting for her to make the first initiative in speaking. Once she had pried herself away from Yaz, the Doctor moved her eyes across the room looking for the tea cup that had been taken from her. As her sight settled on it, Ryan moved across to get it for her as the two other companions looked as though they would not let the Doctor get up from the sofa. 

It was no longer hot, the cup of tea, only mildly warm. With one hand, the Doctor reached into her coat pocket and retrieved the partner sensor that she had the was looking over the Master. He had yet to wake up. For not needing as much sleep as her human companions did, the Master would always be one to sleep for days on end because he could. Seeing Yaz tentatively reach out for the sensor, the Doctor recoiled and took it in her hand to hold close to her. Graham got up without a word and returned some minutes later with a plate to go with the Doctor’s lukewarm cup of tea, on it was a sandwich and custard creams. He knew which one the Doctor would go for, if they weren’t in the middle of a mental breakdown, but he thought that he might as well give her the option. To him it was strange, seeing her eye Yaz with uncertainty as she set down the sensor and reached for a custard cream. 

“You want to talk about it?” Yaz questioned the Doctor.

She only looked at her companion.

“Doctor, it’s been three months. You could have at least told us you were alive.”

Ryan piped up, “Yeah, it sounded like you were going on a suicide mission make there and now you’re here.”

She sat much like a child would when they had been scolded, making themselves look as small as possible with their head hung low. “No.” If the room hadn’t been silent, none of them would have heard her speak.

“No what?” Yaz asked her.

“I couldn’t tell you where I was. I couldn’t tell anyone and I don’t know how he found me.” It wasn’t until then that the Doctor realized that she didn’t know how Jack had found her in the Judoon prison.

“Who found you? The Master?” She was calm but the Doctor could tell that she didn’t want to have to say his name aloud.

“Jack.”

This time it was Graham that spoke up, “Where did Jack find you?”

The Doctor mumbled under her breath something that sounded like Judoon and prison to her companions. “Did the Judoon send you to prison?” Yaz’s police officer training was trying to kick in but she had to fight it back. “Do you know why?”

“No, they wouldn’t tell me anything. They’d only experiment.”

The phrase ‘they’d only experiment’ sent shivers down the spines of each of the companions. They were all too stunned to ask what it truly meant but all knew deep down that they needed not a verbal answer from her as they could see in her body language that she had felt violated. 

“Is there anything we can do to help?” Yaz spoke with a soft voice before either of the others could.

For unknown reasons, Yaz asking if they could help was the straw that broke the metaphorical camel’s back. The next thing any of the three companions knew was that broken words and sentences kept falling from the Doctor’s mouth. They sounded disjointed and at some points the Doctor ended up a bit choked up, but slowly she began to truly open up to her companions. None of them tried to stop or slow her words, they just listened intently. With each new detail that was added, the Doctor felt another damn inside her break and more images and information was brought to the surface. It had been so long since she had opened up to someone. She hadn’t realized that she was attempting to explain her last few hundreds of years until she stopped just before telling them about the Mondas colony ship. 

She started back up again with immense trepidation. “There were two of them on the ship, two Masters.” When the Doctor said that she could almost feel the air being sucked out of the lungs of her companions. The Master that she knew and the one they had encountered at times felt like night and day in their differences. She knew that hidden somewhere in the Master was her beloved Koschei and none of her companions had ever seen that side of them. Maybe Bill and Nardole had when Missy was not trying to scare them half to death. Looking back, O had been so close to Koschei that the Doctor cursed herself for not seeing right through him. “Missy and her previous incarnation. I wanted Missy to side with me, but they’d never turn against themselves. It shouldn’t have surprised me to see her go with him.” After that the Doctor attempted to stop any further breaks, just letting the words and such happen. What she hadn’t expected herself to say was the current state of the Master. But she had and now it was out there. 

“Do you believe him? About what he said about you being this Timeless Child?” Graham asked her.

“Maybe, I don’t know,” the three companions didn’t know what to think. Had this truly been what had driven away their friend’s bright, bubbly attitude? They had already seen a destroyed Gallifrey and if you threw both of those on- a destroyed planet and the fact that you might have been experimented on as a child- a person then it made sense that they’d be adversely affected. 

Ryan felt like the brave one to ask the unspoken question in the room, “If he does love you, still, would he lie about this sort of thing?” 

“I don’t know. He’s always been a capable wordsmith, lying his way out of trouble as best he could.”

“Is there a way to check and see if what he told you was the truth?” Yaz just wanted her friend to get back to her old self. 

“There’s the Matrix Chamber where he told me but there’s also a copy. He probably destroyed it when he destroyed everything else.”

“Well, then why don’t we at least try and start there?” Sometimes the Doctor felt as though it was Yaz who had lived through thousands of years and spoke from experience and not herself. 

The Doctor led the three back to the Tardis, mostly with Yaz’s help as she had been the one to initially find her. Once they had all reached it, the three companions took a step back from the Doctor to give her a bit of space in case she wanted to escape on her own or if she wanted them to come. When the door didn’t close behind the Doctor they all took that as their sign that they were allowed aboard. They chose to keep their distance from her, just so she would have space, and sat on the stairs at the back of the console room and just watched her begin her usual dance around the console itself. In the past the Doctor had made some off-handed remark that at the worst of times, turbulence in the Tardis was caused by an issue between where she wanted to go and where the Tardis thought she needed to be. They had also heard her speak to the ship as though it could respond, and with what they had all seen in the universe it very well might be able to for all they really knew. This take off involved no comments directed at the console and no turbulence once they were in the time vortex itself. Maybe the Tardis was agreeing that they needed to go back to Gallifrey. 

The Doctor didn’t turn to them as she spoke, “I’m going to try to land the Tardis near where the copy of the Matrix is, but it is up to the Tardis to decide if she actually wants to be there.”  
_____

The Doctor had never brought a companion to Arcadia, never in all her lives had she planned to bring one to the Citadel in general but things happened. She hadn’t wanted to give in to their constant asking but she had anyway. With the state the Master had left the Citadel in, she was sure that seeing Arcadia in a state of ruin would positively break her. 

There would always be a part of the Doctor that loved Arcadia more than any place on Gallifrey, or sometimes the whole of the universe. The city, like its people, had been loud and vibrant. Where the Citadel was stagnant, Arcadia was ever changing and on the forefront of innovation. Citadel dwellers had always liked to claim that it was them that discovered time travel, and it was, but it was Arcadia that had turned it into an artform. It was stated and taught to all Gallifreyans that High Gallifreyan, and all its stiff lettering, came from the Citadel but the beautiful whirls of Circular and Linear Gallifreyan came from Arcadia. In later years the Doctor would come to compare the citizens of Arcadia to Earth’s hippy population. They were the timelords that had decided not to be puppets to the High Council and instead be their own people. Arcadia wasn’t ruled by the classist rules of the Citadel. When the Citadel stood by their ancient laws and forced arranged marriages, Arcadia allowed for the people to govern themselves and chose love over arrangement. When the Doctor was younger, much younger, she often imagined running off to live in Arcadia as a way to escape. And, deep down, she had hoped then that Koschei might follow and together they could throw away the ideas of the great houses and finally be together. She had known that it was a frivolous fantasy that would never come true. Back then she had known that no matter what her hearts desired she could never have Koschei for her own, neither the Oakdowns nor the Lungbarrows would allow it with the war between the two houses still going strong. On top of that, Koschei had been rebellious, yes, but he had always listened and done what his parents had asked of him. 

The Doctor knew that, without a doubt, the Master would have destroyed Arcadia first almost as a warning to the Citadel that they were next. She had been caught up in enough of his plans and schemes over the years to know that. With Arcadia gone, the Citadel would have fallen quickly. As the Matrix was the repository for the history of the Timelords and, by extension greater Gallifrey, there was a copy of all its information stored elsewhere for safe keeping. It was from the Matrix copy in the Citadel that students at the Academy were taught their history from. However, with the way that Rassilon and the High Council tended to favor history that favored them it was an unspoken fact that the Matrix database had been tampered with. The large amount of data missing surrounding the Timeless Child could attest to this. But, while the Matrix in the Citadel was altered, its copy could not be changed. During the Last Great Time War, Arcadia was the safest place to be with it’s four hundred sky trenches and heavy defenses. To an outsider it might have looked strange, the sheer amount of militaristic protection around a city populated by hippy timelords. These timelords, the ones who bucked the system, were the keepers of Gallifrey’s true history and the cosmos, not the altered one that was favored by the elites, for it was them that kept the pure and unchanged copy of the Matrix database.

Having long since associated Arcadia with music, the Doctor prepared herself for the deafening silence she knew would greet her. 

The pure bright sounds of a modified Lassimater could be heard outside. Unsure if the Tardis or winds were mocking her, the Doctor told her companions to stay where they were and to not move. She quickly checked the sensor linked to the Master’s and saw that he was still sound asleep before slipping it into her pocket. On top of that, the Doctor also checked that the Tardis had landed them on Gallifrey after the Master had destroyed the planet. With trepidation the Doctor walked to the Tardis’ doors and opened one. With what she saw the Doctor quickly fell to the floor. Arcadia hadn’t been touched. The Master had left Arcadia be. Young children could be seen running in the streets as their family or friends chased after them. The Doctor heard a rush of feet behind her and felt bodies press close to her. Too entranced by the sight before her, the Doctor all but ignored her companions in favor of watching the people she thought dead. As had been happening recently, a tear escaped the Doctor’s eye without so much as waiting for her approval to do so.

“This is Gallifrey?” Ryan asked.

“It’s,” the Doctor felt her voice break before she heard it, “Arcadia.”

“So, this isn’t Gallifrey?”

The Tardis tried to translate some of what the Doctor was saying as she had fallen to speaking in her mother tongue. To her companions, Gallifreyan sounded like the most beautiful music that could only be made after a lifetime of practice. The only word that the Tardis could translate was ‘city’. They made no effort to point out that they could not understand her, choosing instead to listen to the beautiful language instead. When the Doctor got up and left her Tardis, they followed close behind. All around them the beautiful language could be heard and the three companions were awh struck. They had all seen notes the Doctor had left for herself around the Tardis written in Circular Gallifreyan but never before had they heard her speak it. It wasn’t until they had reached an old building that they stopped. Without telling her companions the Doctor walked inside and the trio were left outside. 

“We should wait here for the Doc, avoid getting lost that way,” Graham told the other two. Not wanting to try their luck, the other two listened and sat down on the stairs that led up to the door. It wasn’t before long that a small child with dark braids ran up to them and spoke to them. All three of the companions assumed that the child might have been saying hello or asking who they were but since they didn’t speak the language they were unsure. They heard a voice yell in the language and the child responded with a short clipped word. A man turned down an alleyway and walked right to them. He scolded her in the language before turning and speaking to the trio. It didn’t take him long to know that they didn’t understand him. From their clothes he guessed that they were from Earth and had to have traveled here someway, most likely by Tardis. If they had come there by Tardis then the translation matrix would already be in their head so he spoke to them in a language he knew would translate. “I’m sorry about my daughter, she’s very curious about everything.”

Yaz kept calm but asked, “Do you speak English here?” 

The man laughed, “No, but I assume you came here by Tardis and with that the translation matrix would already be in your head. It translates to English for you since that’s easiest for you to understand. We don’t have many earth travelers here, so might I ask what you’re doing here?”

“We came with someone, she’s inside right now,” Yaz told him.

“It’s rare that a non-Gallifreyan is allowed in there, you’re only permitted into the Matrix when you need to be.”

“She’s a timelord and was let in.”

“Timelords are Gallifreyans, though only a fraction of the population. Who are they?”

\---

“You are from the Citadel, correct?” The Keeper of the Matrix had to make sure of who exactly was permitted into the Matrix, especially after the Master had destroyed the Citadel.

The Doctor knew from experience with the Citadel’s keepers that short one word answers were the usually the best responses to them, “Yes.”

“Are you of one of the great houses?”

“Lungbarrow.”

The Keeper looked up from their records at the Doctor. She felt as though their eyes were staring into her. “Name?”

“Theta Sigma Lungbarrow, the Doctor now.”

The Keeper looked surprised but was silent but gestured for her to follow him into the Matrix Chamber. As she entered the Doctor gave the Keeper a curt nod, “Thank you.” Part of her was scared at what she would find.

There was no one else in the Matrix Chamber, just her. While the Doctor knew that this Matrix would also have a paralysis field she opted against that method of traversing the database. Instead she used a trick from the Academy that opened her mind and joined it to the database itself. The first thing she went looking for was that very first image in the Matrix that the Master had shown her, when Tecteun had found the Timeless Child. In the Citadel’s version the image had felt distorted as though it had been altered for some unknown reason. With the distortion not present, the Doctor could see the girl identified as the Timeless Child. However, unlike in the Citadel, the Timeless Child was with a young boy similar in age and dressed in like clothing. An air of familiarity surrounded them in a way that she couldn’t have felt when the Master showed her as his anger had been too strong. There wasn’t a Timeless Child, there were the Timeless Children. Both felt so incredibly familiar it was like when she had met younger incarnations of herself. But the boy, in her mind he felt like Koschei did. 

Choosing to follow the pair through the Matrix database, the doctor found that the pair was always together and they were absolutely inseparable. The scenes she had seen in the Citadel’s Matrix didn’t feel as distorted, and they wouldn’t, but she wondered why they would have lied about the Timeless Child. Much less, why would they have lied about the Timeless Children. If they had wanted a noble creation story, as the Master had put it, why had they not just removed both of them from the Matrix’s database? When she finally got to the part that had been erased from the Citadel the Doctor quietly listened to what had been recorded. The Division, part of the Celestial Intervention Agency, had agents that were meant to keep the two Timeless Children apart from one another. To the Citadel Timelords used one of them as a regeneration experiment, which the Doctor already knew, and the other was an experiment of the mind. The second Timeless Child had felt like the Master, just as the first had felt like herself. By the records of Arcadia’s Matrix, the drums were not the first thing that the High Council had put in the Master’s head. Voices, silence, whispers and uneasy music were all things that they had implanted into his mind in the past and the drums were just the latest in a long line of their tortures. No matter how much the Division agents tried to keep them apart, in the end they would always end up together again and at that point they would both be regressed back down to children and the experiments would begin anew. 

Of all the disturbing things that the Doctor learned from the Matrix the worst of it was seeing an infant “newly loomed” version of herself being handed to a young version of her brother Irving Braxiatel. It was at that point that the Doctor took herself out of the Matrix. She was unsure of how long she had been in the database but knew, in that moment, she wanted as far away from it as she could be. Excusing herself from the Matrix Chamber, the Doctor was allowed to leave by the Keeper of the Matrix. She felt the air move as the heavy doors closed behind her. At the bottom of the stairs she could see her three companions. ‘Of course, you didn’t stay in the Tardis,’ she thought.

A voice called up to her, “Theta?”

Her mind was still open and he had never been good at masking his own, even at the Academy. “Hello, Jelpax.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Day 'I Don't Know' of quarantine.
> 
> I have decided that, with my classes being put online when I prefer in person one, online courses are the very bane of my existence. Honestly, I wish I could say that it will all be over soon but we just moved the rest of the semester to online. Incase you haven't heard yet, keep an eye out on if you are taking college classes and the possibility that they'll be online for the rest of the semester.
> 
> Question, would you guys like for me to include a summary of each chapter with new uploads?
> 
> Cheers! And keep adding comments, it's always more fun to read that someone liked this than to read another strange thing that my professors have sent out.


	6. I Was Born to Love You

“It’s been a while, Koschei came by before you did. That’s not something I thought I’d say,” Jelpax had relaxed exponentially since his days with the Celestial Intervention Agency. He had a kid now, the Doctor had never seen him as having children of his own. He had always struck her as more of a cool uncle type. “But, given that you were in there quite a while and we have to get a meal for this little one here, why don’t you four join us for an evening meal? I still have no faith in that one’s ability to remember to eat.”

“Hey! I’m not that bad.” The Doctor wasn’t sure what Jelpax had told her companions but with the way they were snickering, it was probably some embarrassing Academy stories no doubt. 

“The only things we regularly see you eat are custard creams, sometimes tea, and things you probably shouldn’t be eating,” Graham sounded like an exhausted parent telling their child off for eating something they shouldn’t.

Jelpax laughed, “I see nothing’s changed then, Theta.” The Doctor glared at him. “Come on then.” He picked up the little girl, “I already told them this, but this is Lambda. Lambda, this is your Uncle Theta that your mother and I told you stories about. Though, we should be calling them your Aunt Theta now.”

The little girl reached out to the Doctor as though she were asking for a hug, “Hello there, little one.”

“In the later parts of the day she just likes to be held and kept close to someone,” Jelpax explained to the Doctor. She smiled as the little girl tried to get out of her father’s grip. “I think she’d rather you hold her than me. She’s always asked us for more stories about you.”

The Doctor willingly took the small child from her friend, she held the girl on her hip as small arms came up around her and grabbed on to her like a koala bear. “Have you ever seen a koala bear, little one?” The Doctor asked in Gallifreyan.

“What’s a koala bear?” It had been so long since she had heard someone still learning to speak Gallifreyan that hearing the small girl stumble over her syllables was one of the best things she had heard all day.

“How dare you, Jelpax?”

“What have I done now?”

“She acts like a koala bear and you’ve never taken her to Earth to see them?”

“It’s not like we go to Earth often, Theta. That was always your domain.” 

The companions gave each other a confused look, but they were grateful that at last a facet of the Doctor’s bubbly personality had come back from the sound of it. They knew it would have been logical for everyone here to be speaking in Gallifreyan, however they knew they themselves were going to be rather confused for the duration of their visit if that was all they heard. As they followed the two timelords to Jelpax’s home they took in all the sounds, sights, and colors of Arcadia. It truly was beautiful. They were so distracted by everything around them, much like they usually were when they left Earth, that the three would have missed the home they were all going to had the Doctor not stopped them. A heavy wooden door that had a dark red hue to it as well as some ornate golden hardware, it had the same look as one that would be seen in some medieval fantasy movie back on Earth. Jelpax opened it with ease and the Doctor followed close behind with Lambda still in her arms. The three companions went in after her.

“Darling, I’ve brought home some strays,” Jelpax yelled into the home.

“Again? Is he back?” A female voice yelled from further in the home. 

“Not him, but someone else you might want to see.”

Jelpax told them all to wait as he took Lambda from the Doctor, he told her that she’d want to have her arms free for some reason. The woman in question walked into the front room from a door to the right of them all. “Who have you broug-, “the woman froze as soon as she saw the Doctor. She quickly recovered from the shock of seeing the Doctor in front of her and moved swiftly across the room to hug the women in question. The companions all expected some sort of answer from the Doctor as to who the woman was but the Doctor chose to hug her back as though her life depended on it.

Jelpax took a step back from the two women and stood beside the companions instead. “It might be awhile before my wife gets a chance to introduce herself. So, I’ll have you know that she’s Asada Lungbarrow, Theta’s younger sister.” He looked back at the two and urged the companions to follow him and his daughter to the dining room for their meal. “If you just wait here a moment, I’ll go grab some extra settings for you four from the other room. We don’t usually have guests,” and with that Jelpax was gone and Lambda was left with them. The little girl toddled around the table towards, what appeared to be, her usual seat. It was the only chair that seemed to be higher than the rest so that she could see everyone at the table. 

Jelpax returned some minutes later with an additional four settings for the guests and set them out around the table. As it seemed, Lambda didn’t like the silence and began talking as though the three companions understood Gallifreyan. He quietly laughed and told her something in return that the trio didn’t understand. When the three guests didn’t answer her the little girl pouted at them. Jelpax turned to them and told them in a language that would translate, “Lambda has yet to learn about how a Tardis translation matrix works and that Gallifreyan will not translate. What she was trying to tell you was about her new friend Koschei who came by to visit not too long ago.” He turned back to her and told her something that caused the little girl to excitedly run off. When she returned she had a little purple stuffed animal in her hand that, to Yaz, looked like a cross between a wolf and a rabbit. She handed it to Yaz and said, “Leli” which she assumed was the toy’s name.

\----

After the two women drew back from one another Asada brushed the pieces of blonde hair that had fallen to cover the Doctor’s face aside. 

“How are you here? When I left you were still in the Citadel?” The Doctor questioned but was still happy to see her younger sister.

“Well, after you left I defied our parents and married your friend. We all came here not long after you left. Never underestimate the impact you leaving made on the great houses, Thete, never underestimate it,” Asada told her.

“Are the others here?” Asada was glad to hear that wondrous hope in her sister’s voice that she hadn’t heard in so long. 

“Yes.”

“Irving wouldn’t have left though.”

“You’d be surprised. Irving did leave, long after the rest of us but he did leave. Him and his family relocated to not far from here a few centuries back. The heads of house were not fond of our generation to say the least. But, we have things that they could only dream of. We all have happy lives here even if they aren’t as eccentric as living in any of the great houses was. Even a few of Koschei’s siblings and cousins are here,” Asada watched as her older sister lit up at the mention of Koschei. If there was ever someone that the Doctor had told everything to that wasn’t Koschei, it was Asada. “He still loves you, you know. Surprised us all when he showed up and said you had turned him down. But, he must have just misinterpreted your answer, because I can see it in your eyes that you love him too. We always thought that maybe that's why he followed not long after you left, you two had finally decided to throw the old rules to the side and openly love one another."

She tried to deny it. "I don't love him, he's just a friend."

"Oh please, Theta, you used to tell me everything. I might not have been loomed with you, yes he did tell us what he found in the Matrix, but we grew up like we had been so I can still see what you're thinking just from your eyes. You don't just love him, you're in love with him as he is with you. When he first came back to Gallifrey, he said, he went into the Matrix to finally see if there was a way around the old laws. He said that he wasn’t just willing to change as Missy had been, but instead that he actively wanted to change. And with that he wanted to know if there was a way he could openly love and marry you without it being arranged or the family feuds getting in the way. Then he discovered what they had done to you and he was absolutely distraught about it. He made one final plea to our head of house and like a thousand times before they turned him down. You have always and will always hold that boy’s hearts in your hand even if you don’t realize it so, never doubt that he has always and will always love you, Theta."

"After he was turned down, did he destroy the Citadel then?"

"No, not at first. He came here before going back and spent some time here with his sister Elya and she tried to talk some sense into him. For weeks he tried to repress the urge he had to destroy the Citadel after what they had done, she tried her best to help him through it all. And when that didn't work she sent him here hoping that maybe seeing Lambda would trigger something in him that would tell him not to. We could see the rage and anger boiling up in him when he got here but that all went away quickly."

"Why?"

"Lambda, she liked his coat and told him that he should come play with her and he did. Elya had said that this incarnation had a sweet and curious nature, so much like Koschei in his early years and it pained her sometimes to see it. We were worried about Lambda being around someone so angry as she has yet to build up proper defensive barriers yet, she's only 3, but he melted when he saw her much like he did when he held Aurora for the first time."

"Was she found?"

"No, I'm sorry."

Aurora, the Master’s daughter, had been loomed not long after the Doctor had married their first wife. She was the center of his universe during the time they had together, until the High Council deemed it worthy to remove her from his care despite him being a wonderful father to her. After that she had simply disappeared and people had been looking for her ever since. 

Asada continued on though, “I could see why it pained Elya to see him being so gentle at times, it reminded us all of just how much the loss of Aurora had affected him when we met later incarnations of him. He spent three weeks with us here after his seven with Elya. Every morning he’d take Lambda down to the markets and try to spoil her, Jelpax found it funny to watch them when they came back, and the stories he told her. The ones of you and the greater universe were her favorites, they always have been. She would hang on his every word and when she’d ask for another story he’d tell her one.”

She watched her older sister carefully for a moment before continuing. “A week before he went back to the Citadel, Koschei went up to the House of Oakdown estate. No one lives there now but when I asked why he went up there when he came back he wouldn’t tell us. You’ve always been curious, Theta, maybe you should go and figure out why he was there.” She tucked a piece of hair behind her ear, “But, enough of that for now. We should go join the others before everything is gone.”

“Asada, I should be going I’ve been here too long,” the Doctor tried to step away from her sister but she felt her grab her wrist anyway.

“No, I have no faith in your eating habits and its Enhera. You’re staying,” Asada’s tone, the Doctor had no room to argue with her.

“Fine,” the pair went to join the others.

\----

The meal was a lively affair filled with laughter and dishes the Doctor would never forget. For a moment she felt like she was home and had never left Gallifrey in the first place. However, she did check the sensor and it read that Koschei had been asleep for twenty-nine hours now and was likely to wake in the next ten hours or so. She knew that if she were to take Asada’s advice and see why he had gone to the Oakdown estate it would have to be sooner rather than later. Actually, escaping them all to go investigate was going to be a challenge, however. The Doctor had sat down beside Lambda, choosing to spend as much time around her niece as possible since she was unsure if she’d be back. The little girl kept asking her question after question about the stars, and Earth. Once the second sun had set, Jelpax attempted to get Lambda to bed. Attempted being the key word. She was too enamored by the Doctor to want to go to bed just yet but when the Doctor said she would tell her one last story before she went to sleep the child was willing to go. 

Lambda dragged the Doctor by the hand up the stairs to where her room was located. She kept chattering on and on about how she had gotten more constellations put on her walls recently and she had promised to learn them all. The little girl pointed out all of the ones that she knew already to the Doctor before finally getting into bed. 

“Did your mother paint them all?” The Doctor asked. When Asada had been younger she’d plot out the positions of all the stars in the sky above the Lungbarrow estate.

“She painted those ones,” Lambda pointed at the ones on the ceiling. “But Uncle Koschei painted those ones,” she gestured to the ones on the wall across from her bed. The Doctor felt air get caught in her throat with the words ‘Uncle Koschei’.

Lately, any mention of the Master got the Doctor all choked up and at this point she did not know if it was annoyance or sentiment getting the best of her. “I bet he’d paint you all the stars if you asked him.”

“He said he’d teach me Earth constellations when he came back,” the little girl sat on her bed with her toy in hand waiting for a story. “Will you tell me a story now?”

“If I do, will you go to sleep?”

“Yes,” the Doctor knew not to trust the word of a three year old, especially if said three year old had been loomed of Jelpax and Asada. But the Doctor relented.

“Well then, once many, many years ago..,” the Doctor went on to tell the small girl about how her granddaughter Susan had caught the attention of her teachers and they had ended up finding the Tardis before going on adventures. She left out the murder attempt on her part though. The Doctor watched the girl as she spoke and could see her eyelids growing heavy. Before long she was pulling a blanket up over the sleeping girl and was trying to quietly leave the room.

Back downstairs Jelpax and Asada were talking with the three companions in a moment where they knew the Doctor would not hear. “Please look out for her,” Asada asked them. “If there’s always been one thing that’s consistent with her it’s her thinking of her own safety. So, please, just keep an eye out for her, that's all I ask of you.”

“We will,” Yaz said as they all heard the Doctor coming back into the room. 

“Alright fam, we better be off. I hope it’s no trouble for you two that I didn’t think to have her change into night clothes,” the Doctor told the girl’s parents.

“She’ll probably wake in a few hours and change without realizing it, it’s not uncommon for her,” Jelpax said with a laugh.

“I guess this is goodbye for now then?” Asada said to the Doctor as a way of making her promise to come back relatively soon.

“Yeah,” the Doctor and her fam made their way back to where the front door was. Before they could leave however, both Jelpax and Asada hugged the Doctor and her companions.

Asada whispered in her sister’s ear, “You might want this, eight hours left.” And with that the Doctor felt the familiar weight of the sensor being set in her hand again. She hadn’t even realized that she had left it out but knowing sneaky Asada the woman might have just slipped it out of her pocket without her realizing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't intend for this to be done today but quarantine is a bitch. 
> 
> Feel free to roast me in the comments, I've nothing else to do for the next several weeks and it'll be fun. (Guess whose not excite at the prospect of the rest of the semester being online? Me! Guess who despises online classes? Me!)
> 
> Cheers!  
> Loki


	7. Under Pressure

Eight hours until he woke up. Though the Doctor wished to return with time to spare. The Doctor knew that the old Oakdown estate was a maze unto itself and they’d be lucky to get through it in eight hours. Curiosity was getting to her, and Asada knew that would happen. She knew she couldn’t leave Gallifrey just yet, that voice in the very back of her mind was begging her to go and see why the Master felt the need to go to the Oakdown estate before destroying the Citadel. 

“Okay, we’re seeing what my old friend was up to before he left,” the Doctor told her fam.

“Doc, last time you said something like that we ended up meeting a fake spy that tried to kill us,” Graham told her. 

“We’re not meeting anyone this time, no one should be there.”

“So, we’re breaking and entering?” Yaz questioned.

“Sorta, not really,” the Doctor was trying to put up and sustain the guise that she was alright and that nothing was wrong with her still. She wasn’t sure if they were buying it however. The Tardis didn’t argue with the Doctor and relented by actually taking them to the Oakdown estate without argument. Once the Tardis was parked the Doctor addressed her companions, “This place is a maze, it took my years when I was younger to figure out where everything was. If you want to stay here to avoid getting lost and do whatever that’s fine just make sure to stay on the Tardis until I get back. And, if you choose to follow me we only have less than six hours.”

Yaz followed the Doctor but, surprisingly, both Graham and Ryan chose to remain on the Tardis. The Doctor would have found it odd, had she given herself the time to really mull over it but there wasn’t time to do that now. The red grass on the slopes of Mount Perdition still blew gently in the wind as they had when her and Koschei would run about at them calling up at the stars as children. It wasn’t a far walk, from the Tardis to the doors of the Oakdown estate house, but it was a heavy memory laden one. If she listened close enough, the Doctor could have sworn that she could hear a much younger version of herself and Koschei talking to one another. But with that was also the thought that, even after all these years, the Doctor could still hear Lord and Lady Oakdown yelling at Koschei for “being indecent enough to attempt to befriend a useless, good for nothing Lungbarrow.” Even if it couldn’t be heard and was only a memory now, it still hurt to remember that. As the Doctor and Yaz got to the front door another memory was brought to the foreground of the Doctor’s mind. 

Not long after the Lord and Lady had referred to young Theta as a ‘useless, good for nothing Lungbarrow’, Koschei had yelled something back at them that she had not heard. The next thing she knew was that Koschei was running out of the house down to where Theta had been and had hugged her like his life depended on it. They had been on a break from the Academy for two weeks and that night, as they heard Lord Oakdown yell heinous things at young Theta Lungbarrow, they decided to run back to the Academy three days before they should have been there. 

“Doctor, are you alright?” Yaz asked. The Doctor hadn’t even realized that she had stopped. 

“Yeah, let’s get a shift on,” the Doctor tried to hurry up and distance herself as much as she could from her memories. “I had a friend that lived here once, you’d get lost here if you weren’t careful.”

Yaz could see in the Doctor’s eye a sorrow for a love that never was. She decided not to bring it up right now. Even if she, and the others, knew that the Doctor was trying to put a false air to her personality and convince them that she was alright. If she mentioned anything, Yaz would keep her talking if she could, and if she didn’t the girl would do no probing at her. Having been to Arcadia, the House of Oakdown was a stark contrast, Yaz decided. In place of the bright vibrant colors that felt warm and inviting, there were instead dark void colors- primarily deep blues and blacks- that felt cold to the bone. Even the doors were different. While in Arcadia, Yaz was constantly looking about at the engravings and carvings on buildings yet here everything was flat and smooth. Yaz thought to herself, if this was the kind of place that the Doctor had grown up in instead of Arcadia she might have ran away too. 

Once they were inside, the Doctor spoke to Yaz again. “There’s only a couple places I want to check since there’s only a few places that he’d have gone. Stay close, when I said this place was a maze I meant it.” The echo in the great hall forced the hair on the back of Yaz’s neck to stand up on end. The cold and uninviting atmosphere had only increased once inside. Moving ahead, the Doctor pressed forward.

In the Oakdown estate, there must have been only one or two places the Master would have gone to if he willingly returned. The first place would have been his own suite from when he was younger. And, the second would have been the Green and Blue room where he had always preferred to study when confined to the estate house. As his suite was on the far other end of the manor, the Doctor thought to go to that one first and then make her way back with Yaz to the Green and Blue Room. If there was ever a sound that the Doctor wished she could forget it was that of shoes on the stone floors of the Oakdown Manor house, with an echo that made nails on a chalkboard sound pleasant, it was agony on the ears. Lord Oakdown had tried to use the sound to his advantage, knowing that young Theta had hated it, whenever he had found him studying with his son Koschei. Once Koschei, ever the creative soul, had gone so far as to take an old pair of Theta’s shoes and cover them as though they were pillows in order to dampen their sound and make it easier to sneak through the hall unheard. This had only enraged Lord Oakdown further. 

By the time they had reached Koschei’s suite, they had a little less than seven hours until the Master woke. The Doctor knew that the Master had a well-hidden nostalgic part of himself, but this was something else. In all the years it had been since they had graduated and left their respective family estates, Koschei had not changed his room. The Doctor knew that, since Yaz was there, she wouldn’t break down from the sight and was immensely glad that the human had decided to follow her. 

There were still heavy old books that were beside the desk that sat under the large ornate window. She could remember Koschei telling her, not long after meeting her, that he’d stay up at night watching the moon rise from that very window. It’s old metal work still as beautiful as ever. Upon the desk, however was a book. Koschei had always had a habit of hiding away the books he was using for the Academy or just did whatever he pleased, so seeing this book on the desk told the Doctor that he had come here. She moved across the room and saw that it was an old leather book that looked to be from their time at the Academy, given its wear on the edges. Curiosity took over at that point and the Doctor opened the book to its end few pages to see when was the last time it had been written in. Five months ago, was the last time that the book had been written in and that lined up with Jelpax and Asada saying that he had come back. She read over the delicate swirls of Circular Gallifreyan that adorned the page and, had she already not been on the verge of tears for what felt like days now, might have cried if she had been told this directly. Flipping through the book, the Doctor found that it had been a whole book of similarly written passages over the years. The Master wasn’t a lost cause, she’d never give up on them, and what was in the book just cemented the fact.

Yaz had taken to exploring around the room. It was as dark as the rest of the house was, both from the darkness outside and the dark colors that adorned every surface in sight. What captured her attention was the fact that the bed appeared to me messed up. As Yaz herself had, on numerous occasions, been known to either not make her bed at home or onboard the Tardis she knew what a bed that had recently been slept in looked like. She thought that maybe the Doctor’s friend had recently stayed here. The wall beside the bed had caught her attention as it had shelves set into it with little, almost, delicate boxes upon each. Reaching for the box on the bottom most shelf she found that it did not have a lid but contained many small little knick knacks. Rummaging through it, Yaz found in the very bottom what looked to be an old Earth polaroid of two young boys- one with dark hair and the other a blond. She wondered how an Earth polaroid had ended up on Gallifrey and if one of the boys in the photo had been the Doctor’s friend. Looking to where the Doctor stood at the desk, Yaz could tell that she had fallen deep in thought again. The girl ended up setting the photo and box back on the shelf. Joining the Doctor at the desk, Yaz could see as she lightly traced over the language that littered the Tardis.

She asked the Doctor, “What’s it say?”

“It’s a love letter.”

\------

The Doctor had brought the book with her when they left Koschei’s suite and headed to the Green and Blue Room. Knowing that he had left out a book, of all things, the Doctor was unsure if he would have left anything else out anywhere else in the estate. He had always been protective of what he had considered his, Theta had once fell into that category and she now knew why. 

She was positive that Yaz would love to see the Green and Blue Room, anyone who ever came to the estate always wanted to see it. On Earth the Russians had once had a room in what they called the Catherine Palace completely covered in amber and gold, she’d seen it and its replica both. It was beautiful, there was no doubt about that, but there had been something that felt almost dull about it after seeing this room growing up. The aptly named Green and Blue Room made the Amber Room look cheap and worthless in comparison. Three times larger and completely adorned in the Gallifreyan equivalent to emeralds, blue sapphires, and the rarest of blue diamonds and generations of Oakdown time tots were taught their own lineage with each of the pieces of stone. Each held a story and once Koschei had tried to place Theta’s story in a stone but hadn’t managed to figure out how they had been on their first ever break from the Academy at ten years old.

The only warning that the Doctor gave Yaz was, “Prepare to be amazed.” She could hear as the girl’s jaw hit the floor.

\-----

As the Doctor thought, there had been nothing else left out in the Green and Blue Room. Yaz was still silent from amazement that, when they had gotten back to the Tardis, the boys eagerly waited for her to tell them what exactly she had seen. The sensor read just under three and a half hours until the Master awoke again. Now seemed like the right time to return. The Doctor placed the heavy old book on the console before she began setting the Tardis to return to Earth. She had made an attempt to take the fam back to Sheffield, but the Tardis was having none of it and instead opted to return directly to the Master. Sometimes the Doctor really felt like the Tardis had stolen her from Gallifrey and was having fun taking her on a joy ride through the universe. 

Yaz had just found her voice again when the Tardis had landed again. Both Ryan and Graham were too enthralled by what she was telling them to notice the Doctor slip out of the Tardis and back into the house where the Master was. It was early morning out now and the warm golden light had completely encompassed the room. Upstairs she found that the timelord in question hadn’t moved since she left him. She sat beside him on the bed and waited. 

What the Doctor hadn't been expecting was the Master to wake slowly and then all at once. One moment he was just looking about then the next he was upright and had pulled the Doctor's face into his hands.

"Have you found Theta yet?" He asked with a childlike glee that reminded the Doctor of her eleventh self.

"No, but I have found your letters to him," she handed over the book she had brought from the Oakdown estate. The Doctor attempted to catch his eye again as he dropped his head in what appeared to be a shameful way. "You should tell him," finally she caught his chin and moved his head so that she may look him in the eye. "His response may surprise you."

A small smile crossed the Master's face and the Doctor was not surprised to see the energy in him leave once more. She watched as his eyelids grew heavy again and he hoped that the effects of the cyberium would wear off soon. It was almost wrong of the Doctor to see the Master being this open and forward, having not seen him this way since before she had first married on Gallifrey. She removed the heavy book from his lap as his head dropped to her shoulder. He mumbled something there that the Doctor could not fully make out no matter how hard she tried, all that could be understood were two little words 'Theta' and 'love'. Without a second thought, the Doctor played the Master back down on his bed of pillows to continue to recover from the cyberium's destruction. The book was laid on the bed side table. 

As she went to leave, the Doctor had not expected to see her fam standing in the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a Spanish test in the morning that I should 1) be should be sleeping an B) should be sleeping. Also, my mum found my instagram and I don't know how i feel about this.
> 
> Its late  
> Cheers!  
> Loki
> 
> (Update on this whole quarantine online college thing, I still hate it.)


	8. Liar/Mow I'm Here

The Doctor did not need to be telepathic to know that her fam felt betrayed by her. When she had showed up in Sheffield and broke down that first time, she had made the conscious effort not to tell them about the Master being here or this place at all. But they had now seen both her old sanctuary and a broken Master melting under her hand. There was no backing out from this, she knew they’d be confrontational now. 

“Answer me thing, Doctor,” Yaz was not playing any games anymore. She had seen what the Doctor was like on Gallifrey and before. The way she had acted upon seeing the book at the estate, and the way she had talked about her ‘friend.’ Yaz knew that if the Doctor could avoid talking about it she would but she wouldn’t be letting her get away with it this time. That man, the one they had just seen her being so sweet to, had tried to kill them all- the Doctor included. The police officer in her hated to say it but, with all she’d seen in her travels with the Doctor, Yaz would have willingly turned a blind eye if he had been left in the void of space. But, it seemed like the Doctor couldn’t shake him off as easily just as Yaz couldn’t shake off her need for more answers. “Are you in love with him?”

The question startled both Ryan and Graham as they had not seen how the Doctor had been back at the Oakdown Estate. They had not seen the look of unrequited love in the Doctor’s eyes as they walked to the manor’s front door and they had not seen her gentleness in his suite. Both wanted to tell Yaz that she must have been crazy for thinking that the Doctor was in love with the Master. Thinking back to how the Doctor had interacted with O and how she was to the man now, there was without a doubt some form of love there. But, in a way, both Graham and Ryan already knew the answer. Yaz knew the answer, she just wanted to hear the Doctor say it aloud.

“Yaz, it’s more complicated than that,” the Doctor tried to argue, but her argument fell on deaf ears.

“Really it isn’t, Doctor. I know what unrequited love looks like, I’ve felt it enough. So, it’s a simple yes or no answer. Are you in love with the Master, Doctor?” Yaz had previously felt bad for demanding answers from her after their first interaction with the Master, but now she felt indifferent towards it all. The Doctor needed to start talking, now.

Something about how Yaz was demanding answers from her caused the walls that the Doctor had attempted to build up to begin to break down as though they were nothing. She thought that maybe she had gotten her strength back after escaping the Judoon and staying with her for some time with only a broken shell of the Master to help. Those thoughts had been in vain though. She hadn’t made it better for herself, she had simply bottled everything away and now there were too many bottles. Once more she could feel that same rush of emotion, dread, and anxiety that had accompanied her earlier panic attack back in Sheffield. The feeling of needing to gasp to get any sort of air had returned and her respiratory bypass was failing her. There was no stopping it now. With what little semblance of courage was left under the layers of bubbling over anxiety, the timelord corralled her companions down the stairs without a word to them. 

“DOCTOR!” One of the three had yelled, but in such a heightened state, the Doctor did not know which one it was. She simply kept going, hurrying them back to her Tardis. It had become second nature for them to see the Tardis as a second home and safe place, so they got in without any second thoughts. With the doors shut and locked squarely behind them, the Doctor set forth to the console. She ignored her traveling companions as they all tried demanding more answers from her, but at that moment she was putting more of a conscious effort into not having a panic attack than listening to them. Once at the console, the Doctor set the Tardis to return to Sheffield so that she could shake them off for a time.

However, if there was anything the Doctor had learned about Yaz during their travels it was that she was persistent. “Doctor, are you in love with him?” The demanding zone in her voice bit at the Doctor’s carefully constructed exterior. It sounded too much like when Lord and Lady Lungbarrow had found out that Theta had had a crush on Koschei, an Oakdown and therefore the worst Gallifrey had to offer. The sound of her mother’s voice, disgusted and demanding, was something that had stuck with the Doctor all her lives and likely would until the end of time itself. “No,” was the only answer she gave Yaz just as it had been the one her parents had received. Yaz knew it was a lie, the rest of the Lungbarrows had known it was a lie when they found out, and the Doctor knew it was a lie.

She said nothing more. The air in the Tardis was tense and silent, a combination that in any other situation the Doctor would have hated. Even now the Doctor hated it but there were bigger things on her mind. For now, Yaz and the others didn’t matter to her. There was the distinct sound of the Tardis landing, they were back in Sheffield. As the Tardis was telepathically connected to the Doctor there was no need for her to unlock the door and open it for them, the Tardis did so on her own.

“Get. Out.” The Doctor did not speak to them in the same tone as she had when they had been to Gallifrey the first time. Then she had been desperate and was thinking through ways to stop the Master. Now, though the companions did not know it, she was trying to keep the wrath of the Oncoming Storm at bay.

“Doctor?” Ryan was the brave soul that questioned her.

“Now,” if a glare could level mountains, then half the universe would have been decimated in that instant. The feeling of being the Doctor was falling away quicker now and she was caught in the wasteland between the Oncoming Storm and the Valeyard. Both would have been viable, the rage of the storm mixed with a darker incarnation somewhere between her twelfth and final incarnations. She could feel something akin to fear radiating off of her companions, not on the level of when she had accidentally strangled her companion Peri but it was a sort of fear none the less.

Without further argument, and in complete and utter silence, they left. The three of them were all unsure if they’d finally pushed the Doctor too far and if they’d ever see her again. 

For the second time in just a matter of days, the Doctor broke down once more. It had been centuries since her last major breakdown and she had had two in under a week’s time. The timelords would be ashamed of her. The Oakdowns would have been disgusted by her. And, the Lungbarrows would have thought her a disgrace. No, they wouldn’t have thought it, they would have directly told her she was a disgrace. If there was ever a practice that the timelords preached with vigor it was that they were above everything, including their own minds. With how much of a taboo it was to speak of one’s health, mental or physical, the Doctor knew that better than most. With this recent revelation that both she and Koschei were the reason for regeneration on their planet and the things they had endured over what must have been hundreds of lifetimes, that realization of how timelords treated mental health hit a little too close to home now.

In the midst of her breakdown, the Doctor came to a realization and a single realization. So in the name of this universe was she supposed to admit to Yaz that she might love the Master when she could barely admit it to herself with the ideologies of houses Lungbarrow and Oakdown still toying with her? Was it the idea of Koschei or Koschei himself? The individual or the idea of someone she could never have?

\----

When the Tardis had landed back on the small property that had been hers for so long, muscle memory kicked in. The moments between breaking down again on the Tardis and finding herself back in what was once her room were all a blur. Apparently she had thought it right to bring softer night clothes with her and change into them before climbing under the covers and curling up to the sleeping form of the Master. Previously, there had only ever been one night that she could remember being this close to the Master who had still been Koschei at the time. She, then he, had been stupid enough to listen to her house as opposed to her hearts and had managed to shatter both her hearts in one fell swoop by leaving him in the dead of night. If she had known Yaz then she’d have told the girl that she loved Koschei with every ounce of her being but knew that the one night was all she would have ever been allotted with him.

Subconsciously, the Doctor forced herself to go to sleep there as only a single thought crossed her mind. He was just as warm now as he was then.

Sleep took the Doctor in a loving embrace.

\----

Her mind was alive and awake before her body was. She could hear soft little breaths close to her, not even ones like someone who was sleeping but instead someone who was awake but attempting not to disturb someone else. River used to do that sometimes during their stay on Darillium. She’d watch her former self as though she’d forget if she looked away from him. When the Doctor finally opened her eyes, she found that during the night they both ended up pressed close to one another and had rested both their heads on a single pillow. She felt a hand, his hand, reach up and brush the blonde strands from her eyes.

In the softest of voices, he spoke. “Good morning. Is this dream, Theta?” The Doctor didn’t know if she were in the presence of Koschei, the Master, or even O right then. Before she could answer he continued on, “Because if it is, I wish to never wake from it.” He looked at the Doctor with something she had not seen since before she left Gallifrey, hope and love. The Doctor knew that it was only a matter of time before the personality of this current incarnation of Master reared its head, but that was not now. She didn’t know if this was Koschei, or even O, in front of her now but she subconsciously wished that he’d stay like this. “Do you know how many nights I wished I could wake up to this? More than can be counted.” If she weren’t so close to him, the Doctor wouldn’t have heard him. She wished she could look away from him, that she could find it in herself being able to. There had been too many days, years really, where she had wished at some point he would drop the menacing persona of the Master and just be Koschei again. For just a time, at what very well could have been the dawn of time now, Koschei had been hers and only hers. Either the Timeless Children or growing up on Gallifrey, she just wanted back the little boy that she once knew. And now that she realized that that wish might have come true, the Doctor didn’t know if she should believe it or not. 

She watched as he closed his eyes and felt his arm relax. His hand had yet to pull away from where he had tucked the hair behind her ear. The Doctor wasn’t sure if he meant to or if it were an accident, but he showed her Missy and what followed. 

\---

The feeling of being a single mind in two separate bodies was something Missy had always hated. Any of her formers hated it too, but there was something almost poetic about the current situation. Missy knew that there was some sense of finality at that moment, not just for him but for her as well. Being one mind in two bodies had a sort of advantage to it, she remembered flashes of a former self shooting a future self with a laser. She didn’t know which incarnation it was that did the shooting and which one had been hit, all she knew is that if the laser was strong enough then it would disrupt the regenerative process thus killing a timelord indefinitely. There was no possibility of ever regenerating or being resurrected, and that sort of death would be slow and agonizing. At the Academy, students were taught how to control each organ system separate from one another in case the occasion arose that it would be necessary. In the case of death by laser, each system would shut down slowly and individually. It would be a slow and absolutely agonizing death.

Without knowing which incarnation was going to be shot, not long after regenerating into her current form Missy set forth in determining the look she had wanted with the current body. She had found herself on a small little backwater planet in a forgotten corner of the universe that no one would ever bother checking for him- her- on. It was there that she had found a tailor that loved Earth, almost as much as the Doctor, and had done her various variations of her purple ensemble. They had found it odd however that Missy had requested that in the corset of the ensemble a breakage field be placed. This would be her armor in case she might be the one that was shot, it would break up the strength of the laser and allow for regeneration if needed. They’d found it odd, the timelady’s request, but they were being paid to do it so they really didn’t care that much. 

Missy threw down her umbrella and pushed the tip of it into the ground. She outstretched her arm, “Come here I said” She could feel the blade shift in her other sleeve. 

Her former scoffed, “Seriously?” He questioned her. “Are we really going to do this?” He asked her as she extended her hand to him.

Reluctantly he hugged her. If he had been anyone else, Missy would have been able to pick up on what he was thinking at that moment. But, given that they were one individual at two different points in their timeline, there was no way of knowing what was running through his head when her own mind was so jumbled. Missy knew that now was her chance to dispatch him, for him to possibly regenerate into her. She brought her hand up to the back of his collar and toyed with it between her fingers as a means of distracting him from what she was going to do. “I loved being you,” she told him in a low voice. “Every second of it. Oh, the way you burn like a sun, like a whole screaming world on fire. I remember that feeling,” It was at that moment she plunged her dagger into his side. The feeling of being stabbed and a phantom stab wound radiated through both of them, she felt him stop breathing for a moment. It was then that Missy knew that it was her that was going to be shot with a laser, subconsciously she thanked that backwater tailor for doing as he was told to. “And, I always will,” she drew the dagger out of him. She stepped back ever so slightly, “And, I will always miss it.”

He staggered back from his female incarnation. She could see the realization in his eyes as to what she had just done. “Now that was really very nicely done.” While Missy was unable to know what was going through her formers mind, she could however feel the emotions that radiated off him. He was proud to have been bested by himself. 

“Thank you.”

She watched as he drew his hand back to the puncture spot and brought back his hand covered in their own blood. He knew what she had done to him, having now confirmed it. Missy removed a handkerchief that had been folded in her pocket before using it to remove the blade she had placed in her sleeve. 

“It’s good to know I haven’t lost my touch.” 

“You deserve my best.” It felt odd to feel bad for him, she could see him begin to struggle though. The organs to collapse prior to regeneration was the respiratory bypass, in the air of the Mondas ship he had been heavily reliant on his bypass after spending so long in the polluted air of the lower floor. To be sympathetic to him she helped him to the elevator that would take him to his Tardis. 

“How long do I have?” He asked as she half dragged him to the doors.

“Oh, I was precise. You’ll be able to make it back to your Tardis,” Missy helped him get to the door of the elevator. “And maybe even get a cuppa. Although, you might leak a little.” She walked away from him as he got into the elevator.

“And then regenerate,” he sneered, “into you.”

“Welcome to the sisterhood.”

“Missy, seriously, why?” 

There was no way around it. She knew he had a laser screwdriver on him. This was her demise. The end of Missy. “Oh, because he’s right. Because it’s time to stand with him. It's where we’ve always been going and it is happening right now today,” she could see the vengeful personality of the Master in his eyes, the very same one that kept Koschei smothered and locked away in the depths of his mind. Right. Now was the closest she had felt to Koschei in so very long, she almost wanted to say his light wasn’t really there and it was just a figment of her imagination. “It’s time to stand with the Doctor.” To stand with Theta, she had wanted to say. To renounce the Master, be Koschei, and stand with Theta. She walked away from him.

“No.” the amount of arrogance in that one word was enough to power the high council for another thousand years. “Never,” he growled at Missy. “MISSY! I WILL NEVER STAND WITH THE DOCTOR!” If there was ever anything that Missy needed remember about her previous incarnation it was that, after the botched resurrection and the high council meddling with his mind when he was on Gallifrey, he had become so full of rage to the Doctor for abandoning him there that he denied that he had ever loved so heavily that it always ending in more death and destruction than it ever had in the past. 

“Yes, my dear, you will.”

Never turn you back on yourself, was what Missy thought as she was hit by the laser. It was strong enough to cause her to not only gasp but to cause a full body reaction that sent her to the ground in an instant. It burned like fire and felt like ice all at the same time. All of her muscles had seized as she lost control of her entire body in that moment. She wondered if he could feel, if even in a phantom way, the strength of the laser hitting her. Probably not has he had yet to live through it. She could feel the strength of the laser being dissipated and dispersed by the breakage field.

“Don’t bother trying to regenerate, you got the full blast.”

She laughed, both at him and in a way at herself. After regenerating she hadn’t known it was her that would be shot but was thankful for the intuition to have some sort of armor none the less. She kept on laughing, and he did too. 

“You see, Missy, this is where we’ve always been going. This is our perfect ending, we shoot ourselves in the back,” she could hear a devilish glee in his voice. Her laughing continued on. The remnants of the laser were getting to her now. Involuntarily, Missy laid down. She could hear him hit the button on the elevator that would take him to his Tardis. Time began to escape Missy. The doors had closed. She was alone. The Doctor would find her, she would be fine. They would be fine. Her former was wrong, the perfect ending was with the Doctor away from the will of the timelords. Like a phantom voice trapped in her mind, like the drums had been for all those years, Missy could hear him laugh and it echoed in that elevator. Everything was still now, it didn’t feel like regeneration did. Maybe the breakage field hadn’t worked, the mindless beasty had installed it wrong and she was going to die here. 

Missy had lost track of time so quickly that she didn’t know how long it was until she felt the buzzing sensation in her fingers and toes that coincided with the beginning stages of regeneration. It was slow at first and then all at once. She had never regenerated laying down before and made sure to never do it again. Also, she made sure to remember to never regenerate wearing a corset. Breathing was now a challenge, even more so than it had been before. Buried somewhere in one of her pockets was the vortex manipulator that she had snuck off the Tardis after a hunch. When she could move once more she strapped it to her wrist. She dragged herself to her feet and slowly, but surely, retraced her steps to where the Doctor had been last. Nothing remained however. No familiar blue box, no Doctor, no not dead-cyberlady-friend, no annoying egg bloke. The ground was singed, not a soul in sight. He had left her, again. Once more she would be forced to chase her love through the stars again. She didn’t know what she was doing until it was already done. The coordinates for Elya in Arcadia had been set and before she could stop herself, Missy could feel the atoms in the air react to the energy of the vortex manipulator violently coming to life. There was always a heightened amount of adrenaline in the system after regenerating, it was what kickstarted regeneration in the first place so that they wouldn’t die before being reborn. And as she got to where she knew Elya lived the adrenaline started to quickly wear off. It required an inordinate amount of energy to bring her hand to the door.

“What now…Koschei?” She collapsed into the waiting arms of her sister. Consciousness was overrated anyway. 

She woke sometime late, hours or days later if any previous regenerative comas were anything to go off of. Elya had left her on the bed in one of her extra rooms in the house. Ever the caring one of her siblings, she had always been the mother hen of their house and was now sat by her side pressing a cold damp cloth to her head. If there was anything that her siblings had always known about her regenerating it was that following them she would run an extremely high fever and run to possibility of getting extremely sick, Elya had always tried to lessen the effects the first few times. “Hello,” her voice was different and so was her accent. “How long?”

“Two days, brother mine,” she helped him sit upright. There was a mirror across from the bed. She could see herself for the first time now.

“Oh,” he had liked being a woman. But, Missy was no more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Boy o boy do I have some stories for you lot.
> 
> 1) One of the professors at my college can't figure out how to use ZOOM and is instead trying to live stream their lectures over YouTube Live. Somehow class attendance is required too, don't know how that works.  
> 2) My middle school sister is getting class updates from one of her teachers over Instagram Live.  
> 3) My entire Spanish class has come to the conclusion that we'd like to bring back political dueling in the US so that we may all fight Mitch McConnell with pool noodles.
> 
> If I get any other weird college stories/updates that involve this coronavirus situation, I'll keep you posted in the next chapter note.
> 
> Cheers and stay safe!  
> Loki


	9. Was It All Worth It?

The Doctor had never thought in all her lives she’d ever be good at being ‘domestic’, she also thought that the Master would have been particularly bad at it as well. But, perception and reality were two different devils entirely. Over the course of the last three weeks, the Doctor’s perceptions of this new Master’s personality were constantly changing. Had she been asked what he was like soon after seeing him in the Adelaide Gallery, she’d have said he was unhinged and power hungry. After their encounters on Gallifrey, he is unpredictable and psychotic. Now though, the Doctor wouldn’t say he was any of the above. The personality she had seen from him previously was influenced by his anger towards Gallifrey and his twisted idea to bring her to his level. She still had yet to tell him of what she herself had learned in Arcadia, but she knew she’d have to soon. 

\---

On that first day he had tried to insist to his sister that his name was ‘Master’ now, as she already knew but she wasn’t having any of it. In this house he was Koschei, like the Doctor would have been Theta, and she had threatened to swat him if he mentioned that silly name again. Elya had then confined him to bed. It had been another day before Koschei had found the strength to drag him out of bed, not that Elya trusted him to get out of bed. She had already made her determinations of what he would be facing post-regeneration and she was already preparing for him to get immensely sick. No one, Oakdown or any other timelord house, had been quite sure as to why it occurred. Just like no one knew why the Doctor’s regenerations had been so destructive to the environment. Regenerating was a skill to be learned, an art form one might say, and neither had been particularly good at it. 

When he joined his sister down stairs he had not expected there to be any guests in the house, other than himself. She rolled his eyes at him however when she saw that he had chosen to wrap himself in a massive purple blanket that she used to keep on the bed she had set him in. He had recognized the guests mind but he couldn’t quite place who she was. Without realizing that he was watching her intently, the woman got up and retreated back to the kitchen area. Koschei sunk himself down on the end of one of the sofas. Elya followed after her. It was a moment before the two women returned with plates of food. After they had sat down both had retrieved their own bits of food and jointly glared at Koschei until he grabbed some for himself too. He was still too frazzled, too much energy still fizzing around in his brain, to place who exactly she was. What he could figure out was that she looked like what the Doctor had hoped to regenerate into. The women had such bright red hair that one could have mistaken its color was taken right from their red star. 

Once she had realized that he still couldn’t make out who she was, she laughed. “Boudica,” she said as she retrieved another piece of bread from one of the plates in front of them. The women carried on their conversation then, an acknowledgement of the fact that Koschei’s mind was still a touch too disjointed to construct too many stable thoughts in a row. Elya was still keeping a watch of him in her peripherals. 

Of course, she had to be Boudica, Theta’s scary younger sister. The two were so alike that when they were all younger Koschei had thought he might have had a crush on her if he hadn’t been absolutely head over heels for her brother. She’d also thrown a knife at him once when they were very young. Boudica was what Theta would have been if he had decided to act on his rebellion. Theta had had a quiet rebellion that was slow moving but effective in the end. Boudica however had had enough of the House of Lungbarrow and their sedentary ways and publicly rebelled against them. They had disowned her and stripped her of her family title and name. And, if she were still doing it, she continued using the name ‘Boudica Lungbarrow’ out of spite.

"Do you remember that play that you told me that Rallon liked to read when you all snuck off to earth.? The one Millennia thought was comedic in the end instead of a tragedy?" Elya suddenly asked her younger sibling.

"Romeo and Juliet?" He did not see how that held any relevance at the moment and with their current discussion. Not that he knew what their current discussion was.

"Yes, that one. The two families that were at work and a child from each desperately in love with the other so much so they couldn't stand to be apart."

"What does that have to do with anything, Elya?"

"Rename the Capulets and Montagues the Lungbarrows and Oakdowns and change the lover’s names to Theta Sigma and Koschei, there's a striking resemblance in the stories."

"Only issue in your idea is that they loved each other and Theta would never love me."

"Have you ever asked him?"

"He still turns me down at every turn, he couldn't make it more clear that he doesn't love me the way I do him."

“If you ask me,” Boudica started, “I’m surprised you both are still as holden to traditions as you are. We all thought when you left Gallifrey after Thete that you’d had enough of the marital-courtship bullshit an ran off with each other for once and for all. However, Elya here has been telling, over the last few days you’ve been here, that in your sleep you’ve been talking on and on about how Theta doesn’t love you and that you love him as though he hung the universe’s stars. I’ve never read this Romeo and Juliet, but they sound like you two because Theta loved you more than anything. Koschei, if it were up to me, I’d give you my blessing for you to not only court but to marry my older brother. But, sadly, it’s not up to me. Father and Mother, however, have been worn down by all of our actions and might be willing to reconsider again if you ask them.”

\----

Over the past three weeks, the Doctor had forced herself to adhere to a semi-regular sleeping schedule which had entailed many things. Firstly, the Master had claimed what was once her room as his own which left her to be one of the extras or what was once his room. Since the man in question hadn’t even made an effort to go into the room, the Doctor made sure not to touch it. She was unsure if the angry personality she had previously met would be making a reappearance at any point and she wanted to try and avoid bringing it forth as much as possible. This would lead the Doctor to claiming the bedroom next to hers/his so she could keep an eye on him at night and avoid disrupting the sketchbooks that still littered his old room. But, the Master was plagued by nightmares in this form and more often than not the Doctor would go to bed at night after making sure he was asleep in his own bed and wake in the morning to find that he had at some point joined her in her bed and pressed to her side.

The most heartbreaking part of the three weeks had been the turbulent forces at work in his mind. He had yet to truly build back up his mental defenses so he was still completely open to her. Without the cyberium to destroy his mind and all that made him him, what was left of his mind was trying to piece itself back together slowly. From what she could gather, from the mornings she had woken up to find he had joined her in bed but was still sound asleep, the cyberium thrived on negative emotion and it used that emotion to destroy its host. The first thing it also did, after it had been in the host for long enough, was that it destroyed recent memories and used that destruction to propel itself through the rest of the hosts mind. He had no memories of her and him on Gallifrey. The most recent moments he had, prior to her finding him here, were with Jelpax, Asada, and Lambda after coming back from the old Oakdown Estate. And, given the negativity surrounding it, he had no recollection of going into the Matrix in the Citadel and discovering that the Doctor was one of the Timeless Children. Therefore, to his knowledge, the Citadel was still intact as the cyberium had eaten its memory. 

He did have flashes of memory from O though, but with his mind taking so long to knit itself back together with what it had to go off of, it had made sense to the Doctor why it had taken him so long to recognize her. 

The Doctor could see though why she had been told that Elya found it painful to see him this way. He was now what Koschei could have been if the house of Oakdown hadn’t forced him into a certain mold. Now he reflected what young Koschei’s personality would have been if he had just been allowed to grow and mature on his own: creative, clever, and charismatic. She had found him on more than one occasion sketching away absentmindedly on a piece of paper in the kitchen. Her favorite instance of this was when she after she had moved her Tardis into an extra room in the house, and his as well after she had found it in the backyard and had come to the kitchen to look for him. She had found him sitting cross-legged on a counter humming an old Gallifreyan lullaby with a sketchbook in hand and him off in his own little world. Whenever she needed to find him the first place was the kitchen or in the window bay, those seemed to be his preferred locations in the house. Elya was right, it was painful to see him this way. He wasn’t quite Koschei but he most assuredly wasn’t the Master either. Either way she still found him as enduring and as captivating as she always had. No matter what they would always be drawn to one another, as you could not have one without the other in the universe.

One particularly non-Koschei trait that this one had was something the Koschei she had once known would never have been able to do- this one could cook, sorta. He could handle simple things without setting a kitchen on fire, but who was she to judge. The Tardis made sure to keep fire extinguishers, at least 3, in all the kitchens on board in case she ever tried her hand at cooking. Those attempts had almost always ended in a kitchen on fire. The Doctor watched as he would make routine habits as a way to keep his mind in order, Koschei would do the same thing when the drums were particularly strong for extended periods of time. These ritual habits would start from the moment he woke and go to when he went to sleep. The first of these was always to make cups of tea for himself and the Doctor which would be followed by him asking her various things that might or might not have happened so that he could mentally reconstruct his timeline of events. 

That morning the pair sat in the garden outside. The Doctor had figured out rather quickly that this incarnation would grow restless if cooped up for too long to which she began going outside willing him to follow her. 

“There was a year that happened, and then didn’t. Real or no?” He had this expression he would do whenever he was especially unsure of an event.

“That was real.”

“We were on a planet that had cat people with stripes but they weren’t nuns. They’re water did the healing. Real or not?”

“The Cheetah Planet is very real, you had some cat-like tendencies afterwards if I recall correctly,” the Doctor smiled at him.

“I stole your Tardis. Real or no?”

“Very real and on more than one occasion.”

The Doctor could tell that he wanted to ask her about something else but from the way he seemed to curl away from her, he was unsure of whether or not he should ask her.

“What is it?” Her words were soft.

“Boudica said something, she said that you loved me. Real or not?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guys, I just realized that this is 44 pages long in total, at this point. Like, I've tried to write fan fiction before and couldn't get past 8 pages at most. What is this????? (Also, I have no quarantine college story for today since I didn't do Saturday classes.)
> 
> Also, for those of you who'd like to keep track of the Lungbarrow and Oakdown siblings I've got here...here you go in "loomed" order
> 
> Lungbarrow  
> Irving Braxital, Theta Sigma, Asada, 4, Boudica, 6
> 
> Oakdown  
> 1, Elya, 3, Koschei, 5
> 
> Cheers and stay safe everyone!  
> Loki


	10. These Are The Days of Our Lives

In the past three weeks, the Doctor had mulled over so many things, one of which being if she really did love the man in front of her or did she love the idea of him. Had she always, no matter the incarnation, truly been in love with him or had they all been attracted to the idea of someone they couldn’t have or shouldn’t. Young Theta Lungbarrow had been in love with Koschei, there was no doubt there, but was the Doctor in love with the Master? That was a question for the ages. 

“There’s no simple way to answer that, Koschei.”

“Not real,” he sounded deflated.

“Ask me again some other time, then I will tell you if it is real or not.” She hoped that that would get a smile from him. The Doctor had come to adore those careful small smiles of his. “It looks like it may start raining soon, so let’s get you inside before it does.” Another thing she had learned over the past few weeks was that this incarnation absolutely hated getting wet. They had been out in the garden one afternoon and the skies suddenly began to pour and for the next several hours, even after he was already dry, he complained about the rain. The Doctor got up and started walking back into the house.

“You bought this to get away from me, real or not?” He was quiet.

The Doctor turned around before she got to the door. “Excuse me?”

He repeated his question, “You bought this to get away from me, real or not?”

She smiled and stretched a hand out to him which he took. “Not real,” she led him back inside. At times it almost scared her how compliant this incarnation of his was when he wasn’t angered. “This I bought when I figured out how to convert Gallifreyan currency to earth currency when we were younger. This was an escape for us and friends away from the Academy.”

“We used to argue a lot when we were young, real or not?” 

“Real- to a degree. Sometimes we’d argue over the strangest of things, but we made a promise to each other that we’d never argue here.”

The pair headed towards the kitchen. They had taken to the habit of eating multiple meals a day together, something else that took the Doctor a while to adjust to, and a midday one usually occurred just before noon. With each new day the Doctor watched as her old friend came back to himself, the routine habits were doing him wonders. He had developed his own habits as the Doctor had her own and somehow they had managed to make it work. The Master had never been particularly good at domesticity, neither had the Doctor, but they were learning how together through trial and error. 

\---

Almost a week later came the Doctor’s new favorite revelation about this incarnation, he was actively wanting to change. Missy had been willing to but this one was actively wanting to. That coincided with another change. Since that morning almost four weeks ago when he had awoken and called her Theta, she had not heard him call her the Doctor directly once. He had asked, in his ‘real or not’ manner, if she had chosen the name ‘The Doctor’ back on Gallifrey but that was the only way she would hear the title. In every other instance, she was simply Theta. One time, late at night when his still repairing mind had given him hell and had pushed him to the point of exhaustion, he had called her Thete. Not once, however, had he referred to himself. 

“I am the Master, real or not?” His voice was unsure as he said ‘Master’, sounding like a child that was speaking of something that they feared.

“Real.”

“I am Koschei Oakdown, real or not?” This time he sounded more confident.

The Doctor, his Theta, wavered for a second before responding, “Real.”

She then expected him to ask another question but his next statement floored her. “I do not like Master, no one will call me that anymore. I am now just Koschei Oakdown.”

The Doctor could not hide her smile from him, oh how she had wished to hear him say that so many times over the years. “Well then, Koschei Oakdown, I am Theta Lungbarrow.”

And just like that, titles were renounced and Koschei and Theta had found each other once more.

\-----

In the near month it had been since they had all seen the Doctor, her three companions had truly begun to worry for her safety. Yes, she had sometimes dropped them off somewhere, told them she’d be back shortly, and she’d then not show up for quite some time. But this time felt different. She had last been seen with the Master of all people, the one who had tried to kill them and destroyed the Citadel. For all they knew, the Doctor could have been dead at his hands by now. On more than one occasion, Yaz had been tempted to file a missing person’s report on the Doctor. But, without knowing where they had last been when they saw her or really any other necessary information it would have been dead on arrival. Even once Yaz had toyed with telling the new contact she had at MI6. Apparently MI6 had been keeping tabs on all the incarnations of the Doctor and their companions. This contact there she had been given had put in a word for her saying that she had been working with them and was therefore not to be fired from her probationary work and not to worry if she vanished one day. Yaz knew that this meant she was back with the Doctor traveling, but when a MI6 agent says you might vanish it does sound rather startling. 

Graham and Ryan had been especially concerned for her as well. They had even convinced her conspiracy obsessed father to look into any conspiracies surrounding the Doctor. Yaz was not happy about this when she had found out. But, nevertheless, it was helpful having someone keep an eye out for the bizarre.

\----

The Doctor needed to talk to someone. She had left Koschei back in the main living area with the most recent of his sketchbooks. As much as she loved talking and helping him through everything that he couldn’t quite piece together yet, she just needed to talk to someone else right now. Knowing that maybe she had gotten back to her companions a bit too soon, the Doctor knew that she’d have to find another person or persons to talk to. For a moment, the Doctor even toyed with dangerously crossing back over her own timeline and talking to a former incarnation. That idea was quickly vanquished though. 

Knowing that Koschei could keep his attention on his books and not move for hours on end, which startled her to no end given that she had never known any of his incarnations to be so still before, the Doctor snuck off. Heading to her Tardis, the Doctor thought it likely that Jack would have had some sort of tracker on her. Though she might not have been the sanist of minds when they last met, she knew that he would always be there if she needed her. Over the years the Doctor had figured out a way to track down individuals who had placed a tracker on the Tardis, even if it were an ‘undetectable’ one. The Tardis would always know though. Once onboard, with the door shut securely behind her, the Doctor headed to the console unit and began running all sorts of tests that would tell her whether or not Jack had in fact placed a tracker on her. And, as a matter a fact, not even ten minutes later, the Tardis systems had found a link that was tracking back to Jack’s vortex manipulator. Tracking was a two way communication, even if there were some that believed that they had found completely foolproof methods, and vortex manipulators were cheap and nasty pieces for many reasons.

It didn’t take the Doctor long to lock onto the signal of Jack’s vortex manipulator and after that it wasn’t long before she was headed to him. So, until the Doctor arrived she waited.

\---

He went to open the curtains more when he noticed that she was gone.

“Theta?” The book had been left to the side, it no longer was holding his attention. “Theta?” He called out again. Koschei ended up looking for her all throughout the house but could not find a trace of her. She had left again, she always left in the end. He should have expected that she would leave at some point, he knew that he must have been a drain on her. But thinking she would leave and her actually leaving were two different devils entirely. If this were reality then he’d have to come to terms with it. Koschei was alone once more.

\---

Of course, Jack was at a bar, being immortal the alcohol wouldn’t affect him or his liver. The Doctor left her Tardis in the alley behind the bar so that it was out and away from the public’s eye before heading inside. She didn’t like bars, never had. Well that was a lie but it sounded good. Sometimes they were necessary evils to deal with. He must have had a timelord or Doctor sense, among other senses he had, because the moment she walked in he locked eyes with her. Against her better judgement, the Doctor joined her old friend up at the bar top. 

He gave her a look like he wanted to say something to her but didn’t know if it would be a step too far. “Go on, just say it,” the timelord told him.

“You’ve looked worse,” you could almost hear the light laugh in his voice.

“Which one of us is in the bloodied shirt?” She snarked at him. From the way he had said it the Doctor knew that he had wanted to say something else to her but had instead opted for a more tactful approach.

“I’ll have you know,” he took a sip of his drink, “it was from a just cause.”

Without missing a beat, the Doctor asked him, “Who’d you piss off and get killed by this time?”

“So, Doctor, what do you need help with? I know that I’ve told you before that I’d always be there for you if you need help but, you’ve never taken me up on the offer. Whatever it is must be big.”

After the whole Judoon prison rescue, the Doctor knew that the next time she saw him he’d be upfront about things. He was one of the few that if she made him wait a thousand years for an answer he could. There would be no way around it. If she told him however, which she figured she would one way or another, it wasn’t going to be easy to say. She summoned over the bartender, part alien and part mechanical, and asked them, “Any ginger?” Both the Doctor and Jack knew the effect a ginger drink would have on her. Jack looked at his friend as though she had just confessed to him that she had committed genocide. The bartender set down an electric green drink in front of her. Taking one look at it, there wasn’t much in the glass but she knew it was enough and held it in her hand before downing it all at once. Jack had not let up on the expression directed at her. The drink burned almost as much as the ones that her and Koschei would sneak off to and get in Low-Town when they were still at the Academy. She set the glass back down on the counter.

“Okay, now you’re telling me what’s going on?” He sounded stern and definitive, like one her cousins had when they had found out she had gotten in trouble again at the Academy. There were times in the Doctor’s life where she couldn’t imagine ever telling anyone anything about her own troubles but after her Fam had all but forcibly gotten her to tell them it wasn’t a surprise that a glass of ginger hypervodka could get her to tell Jack. So, she did and he listened to her. The longer she spoke for the more the effects of the drink could be heard in her voice. Jack knew the drink well, it was outlawed in nearly every civilized galaxy which only made it more fun. He soon found that this incarnation was marvelous at incriminating herself, had authorities even been on this planet. She hadn’t tried to explain just what had happened since she had last seen him, no, she had tried to start at the beginning of everything. 

With as incriminating to herself as the Doctor was being, Jack knew at that point she needed to get out of there. The whole planet was home to criminals and crooks who, had they found out what exactly the Doctor had access to, would have no problems exploiting her for their own benefit. “Put hers on my tab,” Jack told the bartender. He then made the laborious effort to try and move the timelord who was very sure that she wished to remain sedentary. “Doctor, we really should get you out of here,” Jack was trying his best not to raise too much attention to her, they’d have likely heard of the Doctor in these parts. “Let’s go find. Somewhere that needs help,” that seemed to catch her attention slightly. 

“We have to go get him first,” the Doctor then started giggling.

A drunk timelord was not on the list of things Jack thought he’d have to deal with today. “Get who?”

“You don’t,” she staggered a bit, “like him. No, you don’t. But I do, he’s mine now.”

Jack noticed the individuals around them starting to look at them, they did seem to recognize the name Doctor. “Let’s get you back to your ship and then you can tell me about him.” He really didn’t want there to have to be any alteration to also deal with also, the Doctor was proving to be plenty enough for him. 

Jack almost herded her out of the bar.

“It’s not a ship,” she paused and looked at him with wide eyes, “It’s a Tardis.”

Jack picked up the pace as she stumbled her way back towards the Tardis, there were three individuals following them. “We need to go,” he grabbed her hand and ran.

Jack had never been so relieved to see that blue police box before. Well, maybe once or twice he had been more relieved. Numerous times before the immortal had found himself watching the timelord bouncing around the console unit but never before had it been such a strange sight for him. She looked as though she were a baby duck still learning to walk as she moved about. And, when she had finally tried to put the Tardis into the vortex she couldn’t seem to put her hand on the leaver. Jack crossed the room to be at her side and placed his hand on the leaver. She smiled. He felt like he could have melted right there, seeing the Doctor smile was always a wonderful sight no matter their incarnation. Once the Tardis was in the vortex the Doctor decided that it was a right time to plant herself upon the floor. There she waited for her Tardis to land. Jack had no idea where they would be landing. When he tried to get her to tell him where they were going or who she had been talking about in the bar, the Doctor simply crossed her arms over her chest in a childlike manner and huffed. If what he had heard from River about her eleventh incarnation being childish, this new one was something else entirely.

When they heard the Tardis land at their destination, what Jack hadn’t expected to hear was a furious knocking at the door. Today was just full of the unexpected for him. Before he could stop her from possibly hurting herself, the Doctor jumped up and raced over to the door and opened it. 

“KOSCHEI!” She said excitedly, the mixture of ginger and alcohol still doing numbers on her speech. She hugged him before drawing back and deciding to kiss the man.

Jack had never been so jealous of someone else in his life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I meant to have this out on Sunday. Netflix's 'play next episode' button go the best of me however.  
> Also, I have no new quarantine college stories for this week, I'll likely end up with some tomorrow though.
> 
> Here, have a useless fact of the day too: the first ever episode of Doctor Who was delayed because of the assassination of President John F Kennedy.
> 
> Cheers and Stay Safe!  
> Loki


	11. I'm Going Slightly Mad Here

Koschei had been on his own for several hours when Theta returned with a stray. The stray was familiar, and he was almost painful to look at. As he tried to look past the painful aspects of the stray, a trick that had been taught at the Academy, Koschei saw who the stray was. That’s why he was painful to look at, a fact of the universe that shouldn’t exist, Captain Jack Harkness. While Koschei had few memories surrounding the man he remembered that he was an immense annoyance that needed to be rid of. He had been around during the year that wasn’t but Koschei could not remember in what capacity and Theta refused to tell him. However, before he could do anything to him Koschei had an armful of Theta. Ineloquent as per usual and lacking both grace and decorum, she excitedly said his name before deciding to kiss him. While he loved Theta with more than he thought anyone should be able to, this was not how he had ever envisioned kissing her.

There was a bitter taste on her lips that he couldn’t quite place at that moment but it came back to him when she had all but collapsed in his arms. While Koschei had been reconstructing his own mind, he had also been trying to build his strength up again. The cyberium had done a number on his whole body, mental and physical. But, he had figured out early on that Theta was light. She wasn’t that much smaller than him but she was lighter by a long shot which he would occasionally joke to her was her reasoning for being so jumpy and hyper. Gravity wasn’t affecting her the way it did everyone else so she then had an excuse to jump around like she was still a little hooligan first year at the Academy. As she slumped against him however she became a dead weight. He was, or was at least attempting to, hold her up for a long enough time to gather her up into his arms but that was proving to be more difficult than one might think. 

“I can help,” Jack told Koschei. Koschei could hear as the man began to recognize who was in front of him.

A petty feeling rose up in his chest, “I think you’ve done enough.” The words were biting and full of venom. The drink had been a ginger flavored hypervodka, there had been a time in his life where Koschei had been painfully familiar with it. Jack dared to come closer to him.

“You’ve done more than I have, lifetimes more,” Jack, knowing that the Master was who the Doctor had just kissed, tried to remove her from his grasp.

Koschei had not anticipated the panicked cry that seemed to escape him. She had been safe and warm when he needed it and he was determined to be the same for her. He had no doubt that Jack had had something to do with the ginger and vodka but he was not his priority right then. He’d take his anger out on him later, once he knew that Theta was alright. Finally, with a bit of struggle, Koschei managed to pick up the dead weight that was Theta and leave Jack to himself. Jack could find ways to busy himself while he tried to help Theta.

Climbing stairs with an unconscious Theta was not a fun experience that Koschei ever wished to replicate but her room was upstairs and that was where he was going to place her. He knew that she would have liked to go back to her Tardis but Jack was there right now. Despite finding ways over the past few weeks to control any lingering anger, from what he did not know, he felt like he wanted to kill him. A few times since Theta had been here with him, Koschei had gotten stuck in his own mind and was overwhelmed with feelings and emotions he couldn’t entirely comprehend. Theta had told him that he was having panic attacks brought on by his mind being unable to fill in the gaps left by the cyberium. He didn’t know why he felt like he wanted to kill someone, surely he wasn’t a violent individual. There was so much of his mind that he had lost to the cyberium that he felt as though the only one with all the answers was his Theta. He could feel another one of those attacks coming on.

Koschei tried to keep it together long enough to get Theta situated in her room. He stepped back and tried to remember the breathing exercise Theta would do with him whenever one of these came on. Once he was sure that he managed to calm himself down enough to situate Theta he stood in the silence of the room for a moment to feel the environment around him. Theta needed his help now. She had helped him in the past and now she had gone and done something detrimental to her health. When he had situated her on the bed Koschei had removed both her coat and shoes, ginger and overheating did not end well. He was holding her coat when the panic started to make its reappearance. Without realizing, he draped it around himself and headed to the kitchen. At that moment he began moving on sheer instinct. At this point in their regeneration cycles, consuming ginger would have been highly frowned upon and the act of mixing it with alcohol could have deadly consequences. Koschei had willingly taken the medical classes at the Academy while Theta had been forced to and chose to occupy the time by sleeping instead of paying attention. Theta had always been spontaneous but also reserved in a way. If she, in any incarnation, hadn’t wanted to talk she wouldn’t’ve. But, if Theta hadn’t wanted to tell the individual yet still had no choice but to then that would have been a different story. Koschei figured that Jack had given her the drink as a way of getting her to talk. He likely wouldn’t have known what it would do to her.

Koschei, on the hunt for ice to cool down Theta, felt another round of panic overtake him when he was in the kitchen. This was not long after Jack had come in and had addressed him as ‘Master.’ He had set down the glass of ice and grabbed onto the counter with such force that any human might have broken their fingers. Gallifreyan durability did come in handy sometimes. He shut his eyes so tightly that it caused a stinging sensation. Without thinking he forgoed the breathing exercise that had helped earlier. Now he was just trying to restrain himself from lashing out at Jack. Panic attacks and lashing out wouldn’t mix well. But, that was when Jack made one arduous mistake. Koschei felt a hand on his shoulder try to force him to turn around. All he could see was red now. He didn’t know if it was from anger towards the man for what he had done to his Theta or if it was induced by the panic attack. Koschei felt as the glass, cold from the ice, dug into his hand after he had apparently smashed it into the side of the man’s face.

Jack wiped the blood and glass from the side of his face, “That all you got, Saxon? With as much experimenting you did in that year, I’d have thought you’d have tried to kill me with something other than a glass.”

The name sounded familiar but Koschei didn’t know why, Theta had said it would one day come back to him. Well, it would possibly come back to him. Unbeknownst to Koschei, the rage then began addressing Jack. “YOU COULD HAVE KILLED HER WITH THAT DRINK,” he shouted at him with so much anger and vitriol it sounded like someone else must have been speaking. “I COULD LOSE HER AND IT WILL ALL BE YOUR FAULT.”

“Oh, look who’s talking, how many times have you tried to kill her?”

Koschei wasn’t sure what Jack had meant by that, surely Theta would have told him if he had tried to kill her. Would she have? “GET OUT,” he lashed out using his bloody hand to shove him away. It stung to put pressure on but seemed to be effective as Jack did not take kindly to Koschei’s bloody handprint upon his coat. Koschei collected up another cup of ice with some water and a cloth then returned to Theta’s side. He had pushed past Jack on his way back upstairs without a real care for if he had harmed him or not. 

\---

Yaz wouldn’t call herself superstitious by any means, believing the outlandish was her Dad’s job and he was phenomenal at it. But there are just some things that you just know. It’s that feeling in your gut that something is wrong, horribly wrong, and the rest of the world seems to fade away. All you can focus on is that one thing and that one thing only. A little voice in the back of her mind was telling her that it had something to do with the Doctor. From the few things that Jelpax and Asada had told her, Ryan, and Graham when they were in Arcadia the Doctor had a recluse streak as wide as a galaxy. Yaz tried her best not to dwell on it too much but when she saw both Graham and Ryan later on and they said they had both had the same sort of feeling that’s when she knew something had to be wrong.

They still had no way of knowing where the Doctor was or how to get to her but something had happened and it wasn’t good.

\---

Koschei had been pressing the cold cloth to her forehead for what felt like hours. Jack hadn’t trusted him not to hurt her and had been dutifully watching over the scene. He had been sent for more ice and water twice already. It was late into the night now, or early into the morning, and Theta had yet to so much as move a limb. As each moment passed Koschei felt as if he were that much closer to breaking. He had already broken once thanks to the cyberium, but Theta had helped him in the recovery process. If he lost Theta now he wasn’t sure there was anything that could save him again. With what he had remembered on his own, and Theta had supplied to fill in some of the gaps, Koschei knew that if he hadn’t been in love with her for the past few thousand years then he most assuredly would have fallen now. In his memories was Theta who gallivanted across the universe with her tag along strays helping out where she could and saving what was needed to be. That Theta was the hero who helped the less fortunate, the one who saved all but took payment now. But here she had been simple and herself. He hadn’t seen this hero complex that was in his memory since she had been here. The Theta he had been seeing, living with, was the one that grumbled in the mornings and needed tea with too much sugar to wake her up in the mornings. She had been the Theta that he had banned from cooking unsupervised after she’d managed to set a pot of pasta water on fire. She had been the Theta that, despite her wanting to bounce and run around, had waited for him and sat on the other end of the sofa from him and answered his questions when he had them. The Theta that he now held so near and dear to his hearts was the one that, without realizing, was always the perfect muse for him. He had kept it hidden from her but one of his only books was now filled with line drawings of her from these past few weeks when she hadn’t been paying attention or had zoned out. As much as he enjoyed the memory of hero Theta, there was a sweetness to be adored about this patient and joyous one. 

Koschei had been so focused on Theta that he had nearly forgotten about Jack still being in the room. “You said that ginger was harmful?” He questioned Koschei.

“What?” Koschei was brought back to reality, the one where Theta was still in harm’s way.

“You said that ginger was harmful, right?”

“Yes, after a certain point in regenerations it begins acting more like a poison if too much is taken at once,” his attention was still focused entirely on Theta. She was feeling cooler now but was still too warm. “It will cause a fever that if not caught soon enough can become deadly. Why? Surely you’re not so dull that you can’t remember that I’ve already told you that.”

“Because there are ginger candies in her pocket.”

Koschei turned around and saw that Jack had laid Theta’s coat across his lap and had pulled three little ginger candy pieces from her pocket. When he turned back he held the cloth to her forehead with one hand and gathered up one of her hands in his other. He brought it to his lips and kissed the back of her hand. “Please don’t go, love.”

Jack hadn’t heard.

\---

Once you had gone through all of your years at the Academy and graduated you were so in tune with those around you that you knew something was going to happen before it did in some cases. Or, in Asada’s case, if you had grown up with someone and had attended the Academy with them then you knew them better than you knew yourself. To say that Asada knew something had happened to Theta was an understatement. She didn’t need to be told that her older sister had done something outrageously stupid, she just knew. There was a feeling of dread with it as well. Theta needed help, desperately.

“Jelpax!” She yelled to her husband, she knew that her daughter would be with him as well.

“Down here!” Came the response that sounded like it was in the front room. Asada rushed downstairs. “You felt it too?” He asked when he saw his wife who just nodded. 

“You get the Tardis ready, I’ll get the others. They won’t like to be left out of this if it’s bad.” She knew that he had a way of finding her flighty sister.

Jelpax gave a silent agreement to his wife as she ran out of the house to go gather others. “Lambda, we need to go help your Aunt Theta and maybe if you’re lucky Uncle Koschei will be there too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Zoom is the very Bain of my existence. So, I'm in a Spanish class at college and we're using Zoom for class meeting now. It's a two hour class twice a week by the way. Today I was sitting in class doing what I was doing and then all of the sudden Zoom decided "you know what, this kid doesn't need to be in class" and booted me out of the class. I couldn't get back into Zoom until three hours later.
> 
> Useless fact of the day: for the past 80 years the Ritz cracker has remained the most popular snack food in the United Stares.
> 
> Cheers and Stay Safe!  
> Loki


	12. Somebody to Love

No matter how much he had tried to hide it, every student at the Academy had known that Koschei was absolutely head over heels in love with Theta Sigma. It had been a tragedy for them to watch unfold, not a soul in the Citadel was unaware of the feud between the Oakdowns and the Lungbarrows. The feud was one that had been going on long before any of the current timelords had been loomed. Legend had it that long ago a Lungbarrow girl, Yulet, had run off with one of the Oakdown girls, Omea, that was betrothed to another house but she had been defiant in not wanting to marry the man. So, the two girls ran. They had loved each other, everyone had said, and refused to be away from one another. No one knew where they had run off to, all that was known was that they had somehow managed to leave Gallifrey undetected. Rumor had it that they had ended up on Karn, but that was just speculation and whispers in the wind. All that was ever found of the two was the Lungbarrow girl’s letter pendent and the Oakdown’s locket with an image of her sweetheart in it. The families had blamed one another and had been at war ever since. 

Every student had watched in a sort of sadness as Koschei Oakdown and Theta Sigma Lungbarrow’s story unfolded before them. Young Koschei had worn his heart on his sleeve for all to see while Theta had been more careful with showing others his love. There was no denying it however, they were the second chapter of Yulet and Omea’s story unfolding right before their very eyes. When Theta had finally left Gallifrey, with Koschei leaving not long after, they knew that their story might finally have a happy ending. That was until the stories started coming in about their wars across the stars. 

\----

It took a lot to cause Ushas, or the Rani whatever she was calling herself that day, to flee home to Gallifrey. Between the Judoon trying to hunt her down for her experiments, the Shadow Proclamation had declared them highly unethical and a danger to the universe as a whole, and hearing that the Koschei had destroyed the Citadel she had found it reasonable to visit. She hadn’t meant to stay that long, three days at most, but when Koschei’s brother Aelius started banging on her Tardis’ door that all changed. Apparently Jelpax and Asada had both had a feeling that the Doctor had done something stupid, no surprise there, that could bring about her death. While she and the Doctor had not gotten along the past few millennia, she didn’t wish to see her friend die as a result of stupidity. 

Against her better judgment, the Rani followed Aelius’ request to come with the rest of them. Her only stipulation had been that she would follow in her own Tardis. Without further argument, she did.

\----

A single Tardis with that many Lungbarrows and Oakdowns in it was just asking for trouble, it was a good thing their heads of house weren’t going to know about this. There were eleven of them in total, both Jelpax and Lambda being included. With six pilots at the helm, as there should always be with a Tardis, it didn’t take them long to go to the little estate that Theta had bought so many years ago. 

It was within moments of each other that the two Tardises landed in the backyard of the house. Both Jelpax and the Rani remembered how to get into the house without a key which came in handy to the rest of them, what they hadn’t been expecting was a fact of the universe and the Master nearly at his breaking point in front of them. They were surprised by the guests to say the least. 

“You go back to her, I’ll deal with them,” none of them had expected the Master to listen to the other man. But he did and quickly ended up upstairs and away from them all. “Who are you?” The man had a blaster raised at them now.

Little Lambda, who Koschei’s younger sister Tomyris had been keeping at the back of the group, managed to escape. Before anyone could stop the little three year old she ran after her Uncle Koschei. Tomyris then pushed her way through the others and followed after her niece. She had been the baby of the House of Oakdown, the only child of Lord Antigonus and his second wife Valeria and despite being born, not loomed, forty years after Koschei, the pair had been inseparable. The only time that the Oakdown patriarch had willingly let Theta Sigma into the manor was not long after her birth, Koschei had begged and begged his father to let his friends meet her. He had been willing to invite the rest of the Deca in to meet her but convincing him to let a Lungbarrow meet her was another thing. Koschei had been holding the tiny little girl close when Theta had finally been allowed to come meet her. The two boys spent hours holding her with sweet Valeria watching over them. It had been Koschei’s stepmother that had finally convinced her husband to let the other boy in to meet her daughter, she might have been of another house on Gallifrey but she had never understood why the two families continued to feud. But, when Valeria had suddenly passed away a week later Antigonus was livid. He blamed the Lungbarrows for the passing of his wife. 

The woman found the little girl in the hallway upstairs just as the arguing began downstairs. She grabbed her hand, just as Koschei would when he would take her to Arcadia’s morning markets, and together they opened every one of the doors upstairs. There was one left when they found both Koschei and Theta. She stood in the door for a second and watched them. Koschei was pressing a cloth to her forehead and was holding one of her hands close to him.

“Hello, big brother,” Tomyris said smiling.

He looked over at her and Tomyris could see that a few tears had already escaped. Before he could say anything, Lambda ran over to him and her aunt. Koschei who had been sitting on the opposite side of the bed watched as his niece climbed up on the bed, on the other side of Theta. Tomyris walked over and sat down beside the little girl. She carefully asked him, “You really do love her, don’t you?” The woman had never known her brother to not love the woman that was laid out on the bed.

It was a moment before Koschei spoke, almost as if he had to find his voice again, “It took so long to admit that what I was doing was to get her attention. When I finally had it, I nearly lost her.” He placed a kiss on the back of Theta’s hand.

“Do you remember the story you used to read me when we were little about the lady who hung the stars?” She pulled Lambda, who was surprisingly quiet, into her lap.

“And how the stars were just windows to the heavens but she looked at them with such love that she felt like she might drown?” Koschei dipped the cloth in the cup of water again. “That story?”

“Remember how it ended? How did the lady go to the stars and she told them that she loved them and then she was allowed to become a star to be with them? You look at her like she is the window to the heavens, brother mine, but you have yet to tell her you love her.”

“I have,” Koschei tried to sound definitive, that of course he had told his Theta that he loved her.

“Brother, I might have chosen to live a simple life but I have heard about what ‘the Master’ has done and the wars they’ve raged against ‘the Doctor.’ Wars aren’t I love yous.”

He glared at her.

“When Theta wakes, tell her that you love her. Koschei, please.”

He looked back down at Theta, he felt his face heating up. Koschei turned away from both of them but could feel Tomyris’ eyes on him still. Those eyes had always been able to tear him apart under pressure, much like Theta’s had caused him to melt. Tomyris had always had this innate ability to pick out the littlest details about an individual by just looking at them. It had caused her many issues over the years. Oh, the scandals that that girl had been from the very beginning. 

“And if it's too late now?” Koschei knew that there was a part of him that he felt like should be angry at Theta or at something involving Theta, but he didn’t know what. But, that little part was overpowered by the larger part of him that he had only recently figured out how to access again. There were a few memories that he hadn’t dared ask Theta about when they came back to him, they were the ones from very early on Gallifrey at different points in time. One was of himself accidently pushing a young girl off a vacant cliff and another was of him and a little golden haired boy running amuck in red pasture lands. Koschei had known right away that it had been him watching a young Theta both times but they were both so faded he wasn’t sure if she would have remembered them. However, with those memories were feelings that he hadn’t expected to feel. They had both come back to him the same night, the same night that Theta had woken to a thunderstorm and found him sitting on the floor of the kitchen wide eyed. With the first memory was the feeling of despair and dread and intense sadness. That one had left him feeling absolutely gutted. When the second memory came through he had needed to be far away from Theta to comprehend everything. Though the visual memory was that of two young boys running about without a care in the world the feelings with it had felt much older, matured in a way. In a way it felt like that memory was one that had been a starting point, a single instance to remember that this was when he had started to truly fall for the Lungbarrow boy. There had also been sadness, just a hint of it, with that memory but there was also an overwhelming feeling of love. Together they were feeling he knew that he had not actively tried to feel in so very long and that if he asked Theta about them he wasn’t sure where they’d then be with one another. Would she brush them aside or walk away from him?

Tomyris was still watching him as Koschei quietly made the decision to fold up the small chilled cloth and place it directly on his Theta’s forehead. He did not know when he had begun thinking of her as ‘his Theta’ but he tried to pledge to himself that he would never say those words aloud. Koschei did take back her hand in his afterwards and traced mindless circular designs on her palm. She had been ‘in the clear’ for the past hour and a half or so but, no matter how much Jack had tried to get him to, he refused to leave her side. 

He had become so focused on Theta that he was slightly startled when he felt his sister’s delicate finger under his chin and for her to slightly move his head to be looking at her. Lambda was peering at him with her wide endless eyes of hers. From the moment he had met her he knew that those were Asada’s eyes through and through. “Hey, our red star would become a white dwarf before it’s too late. You two have never been too late for one another. For once, instead of fighting against each other just fight for each other.”

Lambda decided that then was the perfect time to break her silence, “Uncle Koschei?”

“Yes?”

“Mama says that Aunt Theta told her and Papa that she loves you. I don’t know what that means, but I heard Papa tell Mama ‘I love you’ before. A bunch of times too, and she said it back! If you tell Auntie she has to say it back, that’s how it works.”

Koschei gave her a sad smile. She meant well but she was still young and naïve of the world. “Only sometimes does that work, bug.”

“Well it works every time for Papa, so you have to try.” With as much confidence, the little girl raised her little pinky towards her uncle. “Try! Pinky promise.”

While he felt like some of his lost memories had been towards Earth and its human inhabitants, there was no denying that human children and Gallifreyan time tots did have some similarities. To both a pinky promise was higher than law. Tomyris gave him a look that he remembered from her being young, it was her ‘don’t you dare’ look. He looked away from Tomyris to Lambda and interlocked his pinky with hers, “I promise.” Lambda looked immensely pleased with herself. 

Both Tomyris and Lambda had been with Koschei the past hour. She got up off the bed as soon as she noticed that Theta’s other hand had moved slightly on its own. “Lambda, why don’t we come downstairs with me, I’m sure Uncle Koschei and Aunt Theta wouldn’t mind if we got you a snack.”

Absentmindedly Koschei told the pair, “There’s cookies on the stove.” They had been His and Theta’s baking attempt a few days back.

“Thank you, Chei,” she walked around to the side of the bed that he was sat on. Despite being younger than him, she had always been better at acting like the older and more mature sibling. She placed a kiss on the crown of his head and whispered into his hair, “Fight for each other.” And with that she backed away and led Lambda from the room.

\---

Back downstairs, after Jack had had to explain who he was and why he was there multiple times over, the group had finally calmed down. Tomyris took Lambda over to Theta’s younger sisters, Boudica and Zenobia who were both sitting on a sofa with more pillows than were necessary. She then headed to the kitchen, she didn’t know where it was exactly but she was always able to find food no matter where she was. 

The kitchen hadn’t been far, only two wrong turns away from her, and it was there that she found her oldest brother Vespasyan. She opened the first cabinet to her to look for a plate and when there weren’t any she moved on to the next one. 

“You didn’t come with us.” She said, matter of factly.

He took a sip of his drink to avoid his little sister, he stared down at the drink afterward. “No.”

“Why?” Tomyris had grown tired of his bullshit many years ago.

“Never liked the Lungbarrows.”

“Well there are eight in this house. Why didn’t you come with us?”

“I’ve never been good at dealing with emotions.”

“No, you haven’t. The only thing you’ve ever been good at is kissing the very ground father walked on and stepping all over Koschei when you learned that he had a crush on Theta Sigma.”

He started to say something but quickly stopped himself.

“Now, before you run like an animal with its tail between its legs, you have two choices here. 1, apologize to Koschei for all the harm you have ever done to him and give him your blessing for him and Theta or 2, apologize to Koschei and Theta with Irving and both of you give your blessings to them. They deserve that much. No, they both deserve so much more than that for what you’ve put them through but that’s your start.”

“That's the same thing, and Irving isn’t here.”

Tomyris laughed one of those laughs that could floor a person. “Irving, not here? Not hardly,” she said when she finally managed to catch her breath. “Boudica forced him, hit him in the back of the knees and then hauled him over her shoulder to the Tardis. Oh, he’s here alright.” She tried to regain her composure as she placed a few cookies on the plate for Lambda, and maybe for herself too. “Make your choice, which will it be.” Then she left him alone in the kitchen.

\---

Upstairs, Theta had begun to stir. Her eyes just barely open but her senses awake. She could feel the pads of his fingers lightly running on her hand, they weren’t as calloused and rough this time around.

“Koschei?”

“I’m here,” it sounded strange to her for him to sound so gentle. She had grown so used to the anger and aggression in his voice and actions over the years that gentleness was something that she might not even be capable of. His fingers stopped moving on her hand and instead he closed her hand in both of his. Neither of them noticed when their telepathic bond was opened and neither of them could stop what passed between it. It was then that Koschei learned of everything that Theta had found out in the Arcadian Matrix.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've had this done for like two days and have just not posted it for some reason.  
> Here is also an order list of the family members that I have for this, that are mentioned in this chapter and previously, and a link for where their name comes from.  
> Lungbarrow-
> 
> Irving Braxital  
> Theta Sigma  
> Asada  
> Nzinga. https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/pwmn_2/hd_pwmn_2.htm  
> Boudica https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/britannia/boudica/boudicanrevolt.html  
> Zenobia https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/zenobia-visionary-queen-of-ancient-palmyra/
> 
> Oakdown-
> 
> Lord Antigonus  
> https://www.livius.org/articles/person/antigonus-monophthalmus/  
> Lady Valeria, second wife  
> http://perseus.uchicago.edu/perseus-cgi/citequery3.pl?dbname=PerseusLatinTexts&getid=1&query=Suet.%20Messalina
> 
> Vespasyan http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/vespasian.shtml  
> Elya  
> Aelius http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Historia_Augusta/Aelius*.html  
> Koschei  
> Tomyris https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/ancient/tomyris.asp
> 
> Online quarantine college is literally the worst thing ever. 
> 
> Cheers and Stay Safe!  
> Loki


	13. Death on Two Legs

Koschei looked absolutely shaken. Theta had just realized what she had done when she saw him staggering away from her. She hadn’t seen him look so hurt since they were children, or whatever the timelords wanted to call them then. Even if it had been several weeks since Theta had learned the truth in Arcadia, she had yet to put any real thought into how she would tell Koschei. The cyberium had destroyed his mind and he had no memories of him going into the Citadel’s matrix. Koschei didn’t remember anything about the Timeless Child. But now he had seen everything: the truth of the Timeless Children, the destruction he had left the Citadel in, and what he had chosen to do with the bodies of dead timelords. Now he knew about all of it.

Theta had expected him to shout and scream, for that characteristic rage to make its triumphant return. She knew how to handle his rage and anger. His voice expressing that he felt betrayed, that was not something she knew how to deal with. “Why?” He stared down at the floor for a moment before looking back up at her and asking, “Why would they do that?” When she had asked him that she had been all rage and anger which led to her throwing him to the ground. Back then he had just laughed at her in response. For a moment she had become him, which he had wanted her to be then. But seeing him now, calm and bewildered by something that shouldn’t have been possible was almost like looking in on herself at that moment. While she might have been acting outwardly like him, in the deepest recesses of her mind she had been in that same calm and bewildered state. 

“They were greedy and wanted only for themselves,” Theta matched the calm in his voice to try and not send him over the edge. Being more like the first Koschei she could remember, a tone of voice made all the difference in instances like this.

“They killed us, over and over again just for their own gains.” Koschei had backed himself into a corner now. Theta thought that if they looked back to this moment in the future that maybe they’d laugh at it. It was predictable that a group, such as those who would become the Timelords, like that would be willing to do anything to make sure of their own superiority. Even if that was exploit and repetitively murder a pair of innocent children to figure out how they were able to regenerate their bodies. For the first time since seeing the Citadel destroyed by him, Theta thought that maybe it wasn’t so bad that the elitist timelords were gone.

\---

Downstairs, Asada recommended that Jelpax try and find the companions that they had met back in Arcadia. Jack, once he felt he was no longer being verbally attacked by the group, offered to help him. When the pair returned with the three companions in tow it was evident that they had not expected to be greeted by a group of timelords. They were quickly introduced to the others and brought up to speed, at least partially, on what was going on. Nzinga, Theta’s younger sister, stopped dead in her tracks of what she had been saying when they all saw a silent Koschei come down the stairs. To them it looked like the weight of the universe was pressing down on him heavier and heavier with each step. Theta stood at the top of the stairs, unmoving, and had grabbed on to the banister railing as though she were about to collapse. Neither said a word. 

Koschei looked broken, almost beyond repair.

They had each seen broken before, they had even been so before. Yaz knew broken after bullies and Ryan knew it after learning to share a loved one. Graham knew of broken when love was lost. But, they all knew what healing was. Yaz reconciled and overcame her bullying as Ryan came to terms with sharing his Nan. Graham had learned to honor and move on in memory. They could all see that the man before them was not the Master they had previously met, nor even O. For this one was different, he was broken and healing and watched the Doctor with so much love in his eyes, the one moment he did look back, that it could have floored anyone of them. And the Doctor, that eccentric and bubbly woman who knew not how to stay still, was careful with him. She waited and was patient. If one looked close enough they might even see how she felt for him behind her carefully constructed walls. 

With history littered with lovers, they were a pair for the ages. No doubt. They just need to learn to accept it already. 

Once Koschei had disappeared into the backyard, Theta began to descend down the stairs. If she had chosen to listen to anyone that was present she might have heard her sister Boudica ask Tomyris, “Do you think he told her or did he run for once?” Those who were scattered around the living room dared not move as they watched Theta follow Koschei outside. She either chose not to close the door behind her or cared not that it remained open. They watched as Theta went up and sat across from Koschei in the garden on one of the stone benches surrounded by blooming flowers.

\---

“Koschei, please just talk to me,” he hadn’t spoken a word to her since she had realized he had seen everything. Not only had she accidently shown him what she had found in the Matrix but she had entirely opened herself up to him and now he knew the truth about so much of her life. 

“What difference would it make?” The hurt in his voice felt like a thousand daggers driving straight into her chest. 

“It would make all of the difference, please, just talk to me,” desperation was a feeling that Theta knew this body didn’t like. It preferred to be bubbly and happy go lucky, but here she was at wits end. “What I tried to keep away from you, from everyone, you know now.”

He didn’t look up at her as he spoke. “You know what’s the worst thing about all of that?”

Theta, against her better judgement moved to sit next to him but she didn’t say a word to him, she was unsure of what he was going to say. She knew that he had uncovered some ugly truths about her and what she’d kept locked away. For so long she had resigned herself from admitting some things aloud but he had now seen them. She wasn’t sure what he’d go after first.

He got up, seemingly enraged by whatever he had chosen to attack first, and loomed over the still sitting Theta, "The one time I had you, you ended up running away. I woke the next morning and you had gone in the night, it was stone cold next to me and all you did was leave a note. 'I'm sorry, but I love her.' You ran off and married her not long after. You knew that I loved you and you ran away. All I had wanted was you. You and me for the rest of our lives, a place of our or, Tardis of our own, maybe a family of our own. You left me. I loved you and you left me. There was that woman that you choose over me and then you left Gallifrey without looking back and without me! Do you know how PAINFUL that is? Knowing that you'll never be good enough for the one person you love you’re your whole being. I know that feeling all too well. There was even a time where I debated becoming human while in a female form because I had seen you fall for those earth girls. I had thought maybe for once if I was an earth girl you'd love me the way that I had loved you all my life."

Theta, not wanting to break into the revelation that Koschei had once debated becoming human so that she may love him. She tried to stay calm as she spoke. "You had your own family, a wife and daughter."

"I just told you I had a wife, just as I told everyone that. She never existed. The daughter I had loomed because I couldn't have a family with you and thought that maybe, just maybe, if I had a child you'd come back to me. She was the first sliver of light that I saw in a long time and I loved her almost more than anything. My Aurora. But she didn't bring you back to me. And then they took her from me and you both were gone." And with that he stormed back inside, Theta ran after him. Her stupidity and ‘growing up’ hearing that she must never associate with an Oakdown had driven her from Koschei so many times before that for the first time, in what felt like forever, she made the conscious decision not to run away from her feelings but to instead run headlong into them. 

The group inside was silent. None of them wished to be on the receiving end of a biting comment from either of them. The Rani, without a care in the world, was the one individual that set herself apart from the crowd. She disappeared for a moment and returned with a red coat in hand. Without so much as a warning she excused herself to the backyard. Yaz, who didn’t know where the Doctor must have been mentally, felt furious that someone who claimed to have once been friends with both the Doctor and the Master would just abandon them like this. She followed after her.

“Hey!” She yelled.

The Rani stopped at what Yaz guessed to be her own Tardis. “They’re not dead, ergo I have no need to be here. In highsight however, I’d rather die than have to console either of them through the death of the other.”

“Do you even care about either of them to just abandon them like this? Maybe a friend is what they need.”

“I might have grown up with them and been friends with them when I was younger, but hear this sweetheart, I wouldn’t call us anywhere close to friends now. All I do now is make sure that they haven’t actually killed each other.”

Yaz was about to comment that she must have been absolutely heartless to just leave like that when the Rani spoke up again.

“And besides, the last time they were ruled by emotions like that Koschei kept Theta in his bed all night. The things he told me after Theta had abandoned him will forever be scared into my memory,” she ended with a tight lipped sorta smile. 

Yaz had heard one of the others use the names Koschei and Theta but hadn’t questioned it then as to who they were. Now was her chance to. “Koschei and Theta?”

The Rani opened the door to her Tardis and laughed at Yaz. “Do you really think that there is the Master and the Doctor? With emotions raging like that, that’s Koschei and Theta.” And with that the door closed behind her and the Tardis disappeared.

\---

Koschei had locked himself in the room that used to be his. Not the one that was Theta’s when they were younger and the one he had claimed as his own when he had first gotten here, but the one that was covered in his books and screamed ‘this is Koschei’s’ all over it. He had locked the door and drawn the curtains so that no light would get in. For just a time he wished to be in as much dark as possible. He knew that if he had truly wished to escape and surround himself in pure darkness then he had just go to his Tardis, which was where Theta had also kept her own. But the voice in the back of his mind, the one that was now drowning in the fact that even through everything Theta really might love him, had directed him to lock himself upstairs as a sign that he wasn’t going to really run away from his problems any longer even if he was locking them out momentarily. He was sitting with his back pressed up against the door when he felt two distinct taps on the wooden door. Theta must be on the other side.

“I know I can’t take it back, not what I said or how I acted. But please, Koschei, can we just stop for once? Whatever is going unsaid between that keeps driving us apart needs to stop. I’m sorry that I ever thought that I might have loved that woman, I didn’t then and not long after that I realized it. I’m sorry for letting old family feuds get to me and for causing you to think that you weren’t enough. I’m sorry for hurting you in every way that I have. My family now is a found family and I love them dearly but you were my first found family. You wanted a family so you had Aurora and you lost her. Unlock this door and we can go find her, we won’t stop until we do. You would not believe how jealous I was when you told me you had a wife and daughter, even if the wife was a lie, because they were something I was always told I could never have with you. Let’s go find her, no one is ever truly lost forever.” She was silent for some moments after that. “I know you’re probably not listening to me in there but, please Koschei, I love you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For some reason I wrote this in neon green, allergies are really causing me to do strange things.
> 
> Cheers and Stay Safe!  
> Loki


	14. Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy

The silence was deafening, not a soul could be heard. Each individual was hung on every one of the Doctor’s words.

Jack hated the Master. There was no way around it, it was a given fact. After the year that never was, he expected that if he even came across the Timelord again he'd try to kill him as payback for what he'd been put through. But, to hear the Doctor come to terms with the fact that they were in love with him was almost more than he could handle. Jack knew the Doc was likely to never want him the way that he wanted them but, to hear them admit that they loved that psychotic bastard was something else. While he had known both the Doctor’s ninth and tenth selves and heard enough about their eleventh and twelfth from River, Jack knew that it took a lot for them to admit something as deep as being in love with someone. When he had heard that his tenth self hadn’t been able to tell Rose until it was too late, Jack knew that there wouldn’t really be hope of a well-timed confession in the future.

Over the day he had been forced to spend time with the Master, who insisted that he was Koschei, Jack begrudgingly admitted to himself that he must have cared for her somewhat. The Master, Koschei whatever his name was, had been gentle and caring towards her. He had also only lashed out at Jack when he had crossed the other man and they were away from the Doctor’s ear shot. While he had not outrightly told Jack that he loved her it was greatly implied. It was in the way he looked at her, even when she was unconscious, and the way he would always hold one of her hands as though it were fragile glass while he was trying to bring down her temperature. Looking back now, it was no surprise that the Master was in love with the Doctor given how much Harold Saxon had talked about him. 

Tomyris knew she had always known why Koschei had chosen to lie that he had a wife instead of actually marrying. She also knew that her brother’s beloved daughter was the light of his life, right up there with Theta, and his world had been destroyed when the High Counsel had taken her from him. They had taken Aurora on the grounds that Koschei was not stable enough to take care of her when everyone who had met him knew otherwise. Back then he had had a small home just outside the Citadel where it was just him and Aurora, his siblings and cousins were always willing to come by and spend time with them. When she had been taken Koschei was distraught for what seemed to be forever, Tomyris and their brother Aelius had gone to stay with him for as long as he needed them. It had taken Theta Sigma two weeks before finally coming by to see if there was anything he could do. Tomyris stayed with Koschei while Aelius berated Theta out front, he’d ended up with a rather nice black eye from the whole ordeal. Aurora had been the reason that Nzinga and Boudica, Theta’s younger sisters, both went into law to fight for the people and what was right. Tomyris had been right there with them, all trying their damnedest to take down the High Counsel one block at a time. Suffice to say, you could hear every Lungbarrow and ever Oakdown stop breathing the moment Theta mentioned Aurora. 

\---

Upstairs Theta waited. She knew that this body was pure rubbish at being quiet and still but she would be for Koschei if she had to be. To Theta it felt like an eternity before Koschei opened the door. When he finally did it was slow and deliberate on his part, she had ended up sitting on the floor while confessing to him but had moved away slightly so that he didn't feel crowded. He was also on the floor. Once at the Academy they had gotten into a nasty fight, what it was about Theta had forgotten centuries ago, but when Theta had tried to finally make peace with Koschei they had both been on the floor on opposite sides of the door.

Theta had finally come to accept that this incarnation of Koschei was as close to the one she had grown up with than he had ever been. Young Theta could get lost in his blue eyes just as Theta now got lost in his seemingly endless brown eyes. Koschei might have done "evil" deeds a plenty across the last few millennia but no matter what, Theta could always see into his very soul that his hearts were never fully in it. His eye had always been windows to his soul for Theta and she knew how to read them just like a book. She, then he, had spent years at the Academy secretly watching Koschei and seeing what caused him and his beautiful eyes to light up or what caused that light to diminish. She knew how to read him better than she could read herself. In his eyes now was hope accompanied by wariness as though she might be lying to him. No matter how much at that moment she wanted to reach out and hold her love close, she thought it best for him to move first. 

Tentatively he reached out to Theta slowly and then all at once. He pulled her in close and wrapped his arms around her as though he were afraid she were just an apparition and not truly there. Koschei buried his head in the crook of her neck. Theta could just barely make out what he asked her, "You do love me, real or not?"

"Until the day after eternity."

Theta felt him shutter before feeling what had to have been his tears falling onto her. The Citadel had been a place of duty, you did what you were told when you were told and never strayed or questioned it, so Theta remained as she did and let Koschei make his decision on what would happen next. When they were younger they'd have never been allowed to be with one another, to openly love each other, but now they might have that chance and Theta wasn't willing to risk it. She had spent so long loving the man now pressed close to her that the rest of the universe be damned if any higher forces tried to draw them apart. 

When he finally did draw back from her brought both of his hands to the side of her face and set his forehead to hers. His eyes were closed but his mind was wide open. Theta didn't know when the bond between them had been reopened, or if it had ever been closed in the first place, but she could hear a litany of 'I love you's coming from him. It was intimate and personal, hearing him say it through their bond, but at that moment Theta almost wished he'd say it aloud so that she may hear it with her own ears. But however, he said it felt like home. Finally, the home that Theta had been chasing across the universe was found. He opened his eyes and looked at her for a second. Koschei smiled softly at her before closing his eyes again and finally kissing her. It wasn't anything like when Theta had kissed him still drunk on ginger or either time her previous incarnation and Missy had kissed. For the first time in all her lives Theta knew what humans meant by feeling sparks and fireworks in a kiss. 

Koschei might have been able to feel those sparks and fireworks too had it not been for all the emotional barriers in him finally breaking. The love of all his lives loved him back and nothing could compare to the joy and happiness of knowing that. 

\---

The crowd downstairs, the ones that really knew Theta and Koschei and had for millennia, had to contain their excitement. Theta’s companions looked awfully confused, Aelius took them aside and explained everything to them. Asada snuck back to her Tardis, leaving her daughter with her aunts and uncles, to procure a bottle of Gallifreyan wine. It wouldn’t have any effect on any of the timelords but it would still taste like wine, she had bought it when Theta and Koschei had both deserted Gallifrey and she had been expecting to hear that they had finally thrown aside the rules of the Lungbarrows and Oakdowns and finally gotten together. That day had never come and the bottle became covered in dust, but its purpose was never forgotten. Once she had the bottle in hand and was back in the house, Asada and Jelpax hurried everyone away and into the kitchen. Now was a time for celebration.

\---

The two love birds upstairs were off in their own little word. Few words were spoken between them but they were not needed at then. Every word that could have been spoken was said with a smile or another kiss. Hands became tangled in hair as backs were pressed to walls. Their own little world was just the two of them for a time, the rest of the universe be damned. They finally had the one thing they had been wanting all their lives, each other.

\---

Downstairs, in the flurry of sudden activity, Graham excused himself from the masses. Handling just the Doc had been one thing, but suddenly dealing with her family and the Master’s family was a whole other thing. He wouldn’t have been surprised if Ryan or Yaz, or even Jack, followed him away from the others as well. Who he hadn’t been expecting to follow him was tiny little Lambda, cookie in hand. She offered him one and giggled when he took it. When she ran back to the others the little girl skipped along without a care in the world. Ryan and Yaz came out, after having been cookies as well, all laughs and smiles. 

“I thought one was bad enough,” Ryan said laughing, his grandad and friend knew exactly what he was talking about without him being explicit. 

Yaz laughed and turned her head to see if anyone had followed her and Ryan. Suddenly she looked unsure of herself, “Do you think she’ll want to keep traveling with us if she has him?”

Graham spoke up before Ryan had a chance to, “She’ll need someone to keep an eye out and make sure he doesn’t try anything funny.”

“Yeah, they all seem to think he’s fine now but we were on that plane and not them,” Ryan said.

“One of them said that the Doctor had mentioned something about finding someone named Aurora. We could go with them, make sure he doesn’t try anything,” Yaz commented. 

None of them trusted the Master by any means, but if the Doctor was in love with him there was the possibility that she might not even see some things, so they made a pact to keep her safe from him if necessary. 

\---

Tiny little Lambda, with her love of cookies and being caught up in the excitement, snuck away from the others. Uncle Irving and Uncle Vespasyan were arguing about something involving Uncle Koschei and Aunt Theta and the others were doing other things. The kitchen counter was high up and she was small, but she could just barely reach the plate of cookies. Lambda thought that since she had already given everyone else cookies, even Aunt Theta’s human friends, that Uncle Koschei and Aunt Theta needed cookies too. Once she had the plate Lambda realized that there weren’t many cookies left so she contemplated not giving some to her missing Aunt and Uncle then she could have more for herself. She would have too if she hadn’t remembered her Papa’s nagging that she had to be nice to everyone, and that included sharing snacks. Reluctantly the little girl grabbed two cookies in one hand for her Aunt and Uncle and another in her other hand for herself before heading off to find them.

\---

Their bubble world hadn’t been ruptured. They were absolutely and wholeheartedly lost in each other. At some point Theta had pulled Koschei into her lap and was perfectly happy with their current arrangement. She, nor he, would have to lean over to the other anymore. They had broken from one another not a moment before when they both heard a little time tot say, “You being like Mama and Papa.” Koschei, with his forehead pressed to Theta’s, laughed. “Are you guys gonna get married like Mama and Papa did now?”

Theta, still looking Koschei in the eye, said, “Maybe one day.” She reciprocated Koschei’s smile. In the corner of her eye she saw Lambda come closer to them and hold out two cookies. Koschei looked away first and asked, “Are these for us?”

She nodded her head and sat herself down on the ground near them. “Uncle Irving and Uncle Vespasyan are arguing about you.”

Both Theta and Koschei stopped breathing momentarily, Irving and Vespasyan had both been the perfect heirs to their respective parents and had always upheld every tradition and law of their house. Theta felt Koschei wrap his arms around her in a way that told her he thought that their respective brothers might try to force them apart. He spoke first, “What were they saying?” 

“I don’t know,” she took a bite of her cookie, “But Aunt Zing said she’d be the cause of Uncle Irving’s next regenerating if he said something bad. Everyone else has red drinks and was watching Aunt Elya braid Uncle Vespasyan. You should come watch.”

Koschei had always been one to correct grammar, even when they were little, “Do you mean berate?” 

“Braid,” little Lambda said matter of factly.

Koschei laughed and Theta placed a kiss on his cheek. “Maybe we will come and watch.”

Lambda, being the jumpy little girl that she was, shot up from her spot and grabbed her Aunt Theta’s hand and began to try and pull her downstairs to the others. Theta, and by extension Koschei, stayed put, “We’ll be down in a moment, okay?” Lambda, who might not have known her Aunt long, trusted her and went downstairs and back to the others.

Koschei spoke first, “I won’t let them, not when I finally have you.” There was a desperation in his voice that Theta would have never heard from the Master. He cupped her face again and held her close.

“Then we’ll run off, together this time. We’ll find Aurora and we’ll be together, I promise. But now we have to go face the wolves.”

Koschei kissed her once more with as much love as he could muster up. Theta reciprocated in full. When he finally drew back, just before their respiratory bypasses kicked in, he got off her lap and stood up on unstable legs. He offered a hand to Theta, still seated on the ground, and this time she took it. When she stood he slipped an arm around her waist and held her close again.

“I love you, Theta Sigma Lungbarrow.”

\---

The roar of cheers and applause could be heard for miles once the two love birds came downstairs, hand in hand. Both Irving and Vespasyan had come to the agreement that while their heads of house might have said that the pair wouldn’t be allowed to court or marry, they weren’t here and therefore what they said goes. They’d both had to have been blind not to see how happy the pair looked. After several thousand years, they finally had each other. Not even their rule abiding brothers could find it within themselves to separate them now. In the time that the pair had been with the others not once had the broken contact with the other. They seemed to always have some sort of a hold on the other, be it that they were holding hands or that one had their arms wrapped around the other. Back on Gallifrey, specifically within the Citadel, their behavior right now would have been seen as scandalous and not proper for public view. But they were on Earth now and if they returned to Gallifrey, Arcadia wouldn’t have cared. 

“We better be off now,” Theta announced in what must have been the early hours of the morning to the others. “We have someone to find.” Koschei still couldn’t believe that the one he loved was willing to risk themselves to find a child that had been so very lost. 

The timelords present knew what that meant and who they were looking for and before making them promise to come visit gave them their well wishes. For a moment there were just eight left in the garden; Yaz, Graham, Ryan, Jack, Theta, Koschei, Irving, and Vespasyan. The three humans and the immortal stood off to the side as Irving and Vespasyan approached the other two. 

Irving spoke first, directly to Theta, “Not too long ago Koschei came and asked father if he may ask for your hand. Father turned him down, but he is no longer here. Therefore, I am left as head of house for the Lungbarrow family.” He looked away from Theta and to Koschei instead, “And as head of house, I, Irving Braxital Lungbarrow, give you, Koschei Oakdown, my blessing in your intentions regarding Theta Sigma Lungbarrow.”

Koschei, despite not truly remembering asking Lord Lungbarrow recently for Theta’s hand, felt his hearts sore at that moment. Vespasyan acknowledged Koschei before speaking, “And I, as head of house for the Oakdown family, do agree with the sentiments of Irving Lungbarrow,” he smiled at them, not a cold one but one of genuine joy, “If you so choose to go forth with this, I welcome you gladly into the Oakdown family.”

“You, Koschei Oakdown, I will also gladly welcome you to the Lungbarrow family. I do, however, expect a formal wedding invitation in the near future.”

With that they said their goodbyes and returned to the Tardis that brought them.

Once more they had their arms wrapped around each other and their faces hidden from the world. Their grips on each other had lessened from ‘I’m scared someone will take you away from me’ and transformed into ‘Now that I have you I’ll never let go.’ Jack hated that he could never have had that with the Doctor, who was now insisting that her name was Theta. The Master, who had stated many times that his name was now Koschei, had done awful things to so many individuals across the cosmos and yet Theta came running to him. Jack had sided with Theta’s companions in their idea to stay aboard the Tardis to make sure that he not only tried something he shouldn’t but that Theta was actually safe around him. They had all seen her break down recently and shared an underlying fear that another one might be destructive and devastating to her with how she had always bottled up everything.

When they drew back from one another their arms remained where they were, the grip only loosened. “Let’s go find her,” Theta told Koschei who smiled in agreement.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're getting there my dudes, we are getting there! I don't know what else to say besides that we're in the home stretch (to the point I already had the next fic planned out, it has nothing to do with this one).
> 
> Cheer and Stay Safe!  
> Loki


	15. A Winter's Tale

Three months, two weeks, four days, twenty-one hours, forty-three minutes and seventeen seconds. That was how long it had been since they had started their search. At first Koschei had been defensive in not wanting Theta's companions and Jack to come with them but the more he fought it the firmer they stood their ground. After three constant months, Koschei had learned to put up with them in ways that the Master previously wouldn’t have thought them ever capable of. They were safe and very much not dead, if he had been the Master and not Koschei he’d have likely killed them all by now in one way or another. And they in turn had learned to put up with Koschei, be civil with him even. 

That night, or as much as night could be aboard the Tardis, they had all come to the consensus that they had to return to Gallifrey to find Aurora. Every other lead had either gone cold or pointed to returning to their home planet. With much reluctance they, Theta and Koschei, finally accepted this and headed onwards. The four companions had grown used to hearing the pair speak softly as though they wished for the others not to hear them. It was in these moments that the four had warmed up to Koschei the most. When the pair were not verbally speaking to one another, or telepathically as Jack had picked up on it a few times, there were little notes that he would leave for Theta around the console. Written in Circular Gallifreyan, none of them could read them but they always made Theta smile. Bright and bubbly Theta had slowly made her return, helped not only by Koschei but the four companions as well. It brought an unending joy to her three original companions to see the personality of the woman they had met on that train coming back to life. 

Theta and Koschei had seen them all last many hours ago when they had all collectively decided that they all needed rest. This left them alone with each other for the first time in a long while. While the quartet had grown used to Koschei and his gestures towards Theta, they had all previously interacted with the Master and none of them wanted to leave him unsupervised and alone with Theta much. It had come to a point where the most they saw each other alone was when they needed to rest and Koschei had refused to kick the habit he had developed of sleeping beside her. But now it was just them. With the corridors of the Tardis quiet and all the humans asleep, Theta thought it the right time to bring up the cyberium again. “Wait here,” she told Koschei who actually listened to her.

She left the console room and followed the halls as the Tardis rearranged so that she could get to where she had stored the cyberium’s jar. While in the past she had used the room, it was housed in storage for dangerous things and entities that she had collected over the years, Theta thought that Koschei should have a say in what was done with the cyberium after all. When she had first brought the cyberium to be locked away it had been placed on the back of a shelf so that it was out of sight and out of mind, yet somehow every moment that she was aboard the Tardis it was almost always what she thought about. When she finally saw it, just a glimmer out of the corner of her eye, Theta was slow to move every object in front of it. A majority of them were in a state that the slightest of untimely movement could be devastating for everyone if it were unleashed, so she worked slowly and moved pieces one by one. There was a heavy layer of dust on some of them, she hadn’t even moved them when she had initially placed the cyberium back there, and others looked like they had only been set in their place’s mere moments ago. When all that was left was the cyberium, kept locked away in its jar, Theta gently grabbed onto it and began to slide it forward at an agonizingly slow pace. It made a scraping sound as it moved across the shelf face. Once it was off the shelf and firmly in her hand, Theta brought it to her face to look at it. Yes, she had seen it after it had been transferred to her from the Lone Cyberman and then back again and she had also briefly seen it once it was out of Koschei. However, brief those glimpses at it might have been that she hadn’t truly seen it before. It looked like liquid mercury in a transformative state that appeared solid but in control of its own mass and space. In the jar it was heavy, condensed and coiling in on itself at a moment’s notice. The cyberium was constantly changing in its appearance, and that made sense. Afterall the cyberium was knowledge and knowledge was always changing. As knowledge grew and evolved, the cyberium mimicked or mocked it by acting the same. But now it was restricted, confined to a glass cage, and it was acting out as though knowledge itself was restricted. 

Theta knew she could not dwell on this however. With the cyberium in hand Theta turned to leave the storage room to distance herself from her dwelling. As she traced her steps back through the corridors, the cyberium felt heavier and heavier with each step. By the time Theta reached Koschei it felt like it carried the weight of a thousand dying suns. Koschei, who had migrated to the console unit without touching it, was watching Theta handle the cyberium. She placed it upon a level portion of the console. 

“That is the cyberium,” Theta knew that Koschei was aware of what it was already.

He looked reluctant to admit that he knew what it was, “Yes.”

Theta made the attempt to say something else then but this body’s awkwardness struck her then. No matter how hard she tried, she could neither think of the right words nor say the right words then. All she could think of was the fact that she had the cyberium in a jar and was preparing to hand it over to Koschei. While he might have been actively trying to be better with each passing day there was the still underlying fear from Theta that something powerful yet simple might bring back the Master and crush Koschei once and for all. The cyberium right then was powerful and simple, it was knowledge and for now it was contained within its vessel.

Koschei could see that Theta was trying to say something but made no point to push her towards an answer. He waited for her moments of awkwardness to pass before softly asking, “What about it?” It was a question he had remembered asking a young Theta many times at the Academy, and quite possibly before he could remember going by what he had found out from her and the Arcadian matrix. 

Theta took a deep breath and just began to speak without thinking, she hoped that the right words would materialize on their own. “This is the cyberium. Everything we, you, have been trying to fix with the unraveling in your mind was caused by this. It was on its way to destroying you so that you would just be a host for it. That is until it left you. Since then I’ve kept it tucked away in the Tardis until you could decide what to do with it.” She wasn’t sure if that was the right thing to say at that moment, but Theta held on to her breath and whatever hope that she could muster up. She might have been Theta now, but for as long as she chose to acknowledge it she had been the Doctor and the Doctor was a doctor of hope. Hope was all she had to hold on to at times, and despite the man who was slowly becoming her whole world standing in front of her she held onto the hope that what she had said was the right thing.

“Until I decide what to do with it?” It had taken her quite a few tries before finally separating the man in front of her with the persona of the Master. Koschei had moments of uncertainty whereas the Master had been overconfident in all. Her Koschei was gentle while the Master was cruel. Koschei questioned things for the better or clarification and the Master did only to his benefit.

“I have a room in the Tardis where I keep things that are dangerous.” Theta paused for a moment. “If you want I can take the cyberium back to it, that’s where it was already, or you can do what you’d like to it.”

He surprised her with what he asked next. “I’ve met River, she once said that you disagreed with the Tardis manual and then threw it into a supernova. It doesn’t sound that surprising but, did you?”

“Yes,” she was a touch slow to respond.

“I don’t agree with the cyberium and it tried to destroy me,” he moved closer to her and by extension the cyberium. While he hovered his hand over the jar he did not lift it from it’s perch. “How far are we from a supernova right now?”

“Ten clicks, give or take,” she thought that she might have had an idea as to where he was going with that train of thought but wanted to hear him say it.

“The cyberium should join the Tardis manual in a supernova.”

Though not much it was enough for her, to hear him say that he wanted to make sure no one was destroyed by the cyberium the way that he had been. She danced her way around the console plugging in the necessary data and information to get them to the nearest supernova. It really was only ten clicks from them. While Theta moved about to send them towards the supernova, Koschei gathered up the jar and held it close. He hated that something so beautiful could be so destructive, but then again he did remember portions of the Time War and the Doctor and the Master’s parts in it. He had developed an underlying hatred for his mind finding beauty in destruction, he figured it was fragments of the Master still lurking beneath the surface and holding the cyberium so close only seemed to amplify them. Not wanting the Master to make a reappearance, Koschei set the cyberium back on its perch and took up a place at Theta’s side. She was standing in front of the main leaver and her hand was ghosting over the top of it. He reached out and the two of them pulled the lever down in a joint action and off the Tardis went into the unknown. 

Even as the Master, Koschei could remember finding beauty in a supernova’s light. It was pure and unyielding. Theta had opened the doors to the Tardis and the pair had sat upon the threshold of safety and the vast expanse of space. Koschei had a leg dangling out, and the cyberium sat in his lap, while Theta was sat cross legged before him. She did not push him. When he felt the need to make the last move and throw the cyberium to the supernova he would and she trusted him to do it when he finally needed to. Had it been anyone else there with her Theta might have felt like it was agonizing to wait for the pitch, but with all it had dragged Koschei through she was understanding. In moments like this Theta understood this body and personality better than she had in the length of time she’d had it prior to her meeting him as O. Her former self had, coincidentally, been the perfect opposite to Missy. They had been able to riff off each other as though the universe had mere hours to live, for that time he had been what Missy had needed to want to begin to change. Theta now knew though that she was what Koschei needed now. While there was still the awkwardness and uncertainty, there was a patience and hopefulness that was encouraging enough to Koschei’s curious and gentle side that the pair flourished with one another and encouraged not only growth but change as well in each other.

He took one last look at the cyberium before glancing to Theta. With a single nod of his head, Koschei looked away from his paramour before swiftly throwing the cyberium into the supernova without a hesitation. He had felt like he had been shackled by it and now he felt truly liberated of it. 

“Is this real or not,” he was still looking out at the cyberium drifting towards the supernova when he asked her.

“Real,” she could not hold back her smile. In all the millennia that she had known Koschei, including the ones when he called themselves the Master or the ones she couldn’t remember, she knew that he had always been capable of unyielding self-growth. He was not just destruction and mayhem, he was wonder and curiosity and now those traits of his could finally come through.

“And you’re here too, real or not?”

Theta did to him what he’d occasionally do to her. She hooked her index finger under his chin and guided him to look at her. “Real.”

While Theta had told him time and time again, when only he could hear her, that she loved him there were times that she knew he wasn’t quite sure of it. She had grown used to the look in his eyes when he would ask if she did love him. If a picture could tell a thousand words then his eyes could say millions. He didn’t need to ask her for her to answer him.

Theta leaned closer to Koschei. "Why didn't you just ask me how I felt now?"

\---

When the Fam and Jack had all woken up and had had breakfast they set out on finding Theta. With a good night's rest, they all had a good bit of pep in their step and were looking forward to returning to Arcadia. While Jack had never been he was immensely interested in the city, and by extension Gallifrey proper, from what the three others had told him. Having all split up to look for her, Graham headed to the console room seeing as that was where she usually was when they weren't around. Though they had all been slowly warming up to him, Graham was not looking forward to the fact that Koschei was likely with Theta. He still was not that fond of the other timelord. Upon entering the console room, he was greeted with a sight that the companions very rarely saw, Theta was sitting on the floor and had Koschei pressed up against one of the open doors of the Tardis. She kissed him as though her life depended on it. While Graham might not have been happy about Koschei being there or Theta’s willingness to let him have free reign of the place, he’d have had to have been blind not to see the love between them. He thought to himself that maybe today was a day in the Tardis kind of day instead. They could continue looking for Aurora tomorrow.

Graham quietly retreated back to the others, leaving the two timelords to themselves. While he and the others weren’t sure why they needed permission to marry when they were all fairly sure that half a year previously the pair were seemingly at each other’s throats. Jack had never met him as O, but the others had and they could see the same look in Theta’s eye when she had been with him as when she was with Koschei now. Ryan had even once mentioned that the look of hurt that was present in her eye when they were at the boudrey with him was no longer there. At their current point in time they all figured that maybe with that permission was something that was needed on Gallifrey, none of them had asked either Theta or Koschei the importance of it. It had made them both happy, they had collectively chosen not to question it. 

The others had joined back up in the kitchen where they had all had breakfast, Graham was the last to arrive.

“They’re nowhere to be seen,” Jack declared. “That is unless you found them.”

“Console room,” for the first time Graham found himself smiling at a situation that had involved Koschei. At some point in time Graham had begun to think of Theta as either a daughter he never had or as another grandchild to watch over, it varied from moment to moment. He wasn’t sure when he had begun to see her this way but it was safe to say that that was a firmly rooted idea in his mind now, she was family to him just as Ryan was and Yaz had become. While he might not have necessarily been the warmest to Koschei, he could tell that the man made Theta happy. And if Theta was happy then he would be happy for her. “They were sitting in the door of the Tardis.”

They didn’t probe him further in what he had seen as they could see in his smile that the pair of them had been happy with the company of the other. Yaz, Ryan, and Jack agreed with the unspoken thought that they could put off returning to Arcadia and Gallifrey for just a little while longer. 

Around what must have been lunchtime, the paramours could be found in the library aboard the Tardis. Yaz and later Ryan had been the ones to find them. Jack and Graham joined them not long after. Already they had looked into countless leads as to where Aurora might be, but each either ran cold or pointed at returning to Gallifrey. They had even tried searching at each of the nine Gallifreyan clone worlds, no matter the level of destruction they may lay in. After the fifth destroyed planet, Theta and Koschei had briefly explained the War in Heaven to the quartet. However, Aurora hadn’t been on any of them. Theta had made some off-handed comment, after world eight, that it would have been logical that if the High Council had taken Aurora from Koschei they’d want to keep her close. Afterall the girl was the daughter of one of the Timeless Children. It had visually sent chills down Koschei’s spine, who was just a few steps ahead, when she had said that. While the four had managed to gather bits and pieces about the story of the Timeless Children from both Theta and Koschei when they didn’t realize it, none of them wanted to think of what the Council might have done to a child of one of them. At one point, a month into their endeavor to find the girl, Yaz had caught Theta alone and asleep in the console room. She had heard the other woman begin talking in her sleep and it was then that she heard first-hand what they had done to the Timeless Children for their own gain. Never before had he heard so much fear in Theta’s voice before and hoped to never hear that again. If the experiments that sleeping Theta had mentioned were anything to go off of, Yaz hoped that they had never done those ones or worse to Aurora. She might have been Koschei’s daughter, and she was still not his biggest fan, but the girl would have been but a child and she would have never wished harm to come to her. 

The pair had been seated at one of the tables and were scoring over books looking for, as Yaz and Ryan assumed, any information they could find that referenced Aurora. During their times searching the nine clone worlds they had come across numerous records and books that they all assumed to be of some importance, not a single piece of text had been left after they had all blown through. Jack and Graham had just come to find the other two when they all assumed that Koschei had found something in one of the books. In one hand he was holding down a books page when all of the sudden his other hand shot out to grab hold of one of Theta’s hands. Even from their distance the quartet could tell that he had had a death’s grip on her hand. She looked up at him. In times where they thought they were alone they were completely alone and spoke Gallifreyan, the others present had learned to be as quiet as the dead in those moments. While they had no idea what they were saying, they all had come to learn the sorts of mannerisms reflected in both of them when they found out something about Aurora. 

“She was on Planet Seven but they-,” Koschei stopped, whatever he had found in the record was awful enough to cause him to waver in his speech. “My little girl, they kept hurting my little girl. They sent her back to the Citadel during the Time War.”

Theta got up and offered a hand to Koschei. “We’ll find her, they’re never going to be able to hurt her again, love.” He readily took her hand and as the pair turned to leave the library they saw the four companions standing not far from them. “Hiya Fam,” Theta said in a language she knew they’d understand. “How long have you been standing there?”

“Ten minutes,” Jack responded. 

“You haven’t.”

“Are we going to Gallifrey now?” Yaz asked. She had loved visiting Arcadia, as had Graham and Ryan, and had become rather intrigued at the prospect of returning. 

Koschei had found his voice again. He sounded like O now a days, all listening and inquisitive, gone were the days of the Master’s overconfident, manic speech patterns. “Yes, we are.”

The pair left the library together and the others followed them all the way back to the console room. Long since had the doors to the Tardis been closed but that did not mean they were that far from the supernova that Koschei had thrown the cyberium in. It was still a bit unusual to the four humans to see not one but two timelords caught up in the coordinated dance of sending the Tardis off to another location. They, over the past few months, had each claimed a set of controls for themselves but would always pull the final leaver together in the end. Flying the Tardis was a joint operation between the two of them now, since boarding there had only been a handful of times it had been done solo. Before pulling that final leaver though, both Theta and Koschei stopped and shared a look between one another. 

Even knowing that there were others in the room that could hear them, Theta reassured Koschei in Gallifreyan. “We’ll find her, I promise you.” It only took a few short words for Koschei to set his hand on hers and for the pair to pull back the leaver. They were going to find Aurora, High Council be damned.

\---

It was late in Arcadia and the first frosts of the season had only just fallen a few weeks prior. Now the ground that once appeared red and burnt orange was covered in a thin layer of pinkish snow. The summer artists had put away their crafts for the season and out had come the wonders of winter. From delicate ice patterns painstakingly frozen to the sides of buildings to the lights in the square that looked to be snowflakes frozen in midair, there was never any travel guides designed for Gallifrey as many never wished to visit but there had always been a reason as to why the planet was called the Shining World of the Seven Systems. At high noon the intricate tiles of the square would be cleaned off so that the snow lights may reflect off of them, yet each night they would be recovered with another layer. Each of the silver topped trees covered in snow looked to be made of glass in those times of year, yet they somehow always cast a lilac shadow upon the ground below them. Young children in Arcadia had come up with a story many eons previously that the lilac hue was a remnant of rare stones that were in the ground and the only times you could know where they were was in the winter when the shadows were out. They told each other that they had to remember where the shadows lined up most and in the summer they would dig for the stones, yet every year they seemed to forget and the adults would watch as the children ran about and forgot about their stone stories. 

But while the Arcadian children ran through the snow covered streets there was one child that was not with the others. The child, a young girl, had walked half a planet away from the Citadel of Gallifrey. She had woken in rubble and waste without a soul in sight. So, the young girl, wise beyond her years, walked onwards and onwards and onwards. She rummaged for food and would sometimes go hungry in the long, dark nights but something was leading her somewhere. The girl didn’t know where she was going but she kept going anyway. When she had come across a bright city she had felt a strange feeling; one might describe it as wondrous and anxious, unknowing of what’s to come but certain that of something good. And with that she trudged onwards and followed instinct. Instinct brought her to a building that felt alive. The young girl climbed the stairs to the doors that looked to be encased in delicate ice. She had never known what true boundaries were, nor thought that she had ever been taught what etiquette was, so she forced open the door and let the crisp cold air in. Inside was warm and bright, not bright like the lab rooms had been but bright with golden light. She was lost in the sights all around her, not paying enough attention to see if anyone else was in the room. Never had she been to a place of such beauty. The rich dark woods and intricate metalwork that covered the walls mesmerized the young girl. 

Her trance was disturbed by a voice behind her, “Might I help you, Miss?” The voice sounded confused. The little girl, who looked to be no older than five, had wandered into the Matrix library on her own with no accompaniment.

Her voice was scratchy after not using it for a long time or not being allowed to speak. “I came here,” was all she could think to tell the individual.

“Are you alone?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know why you came here?” It was unusual for individuals to just come to the Matrix on a whim. You were not permitted inside until it was time for you to see into the Matrix itself. 

“Something told me to come see it,” she was still mildly distracted by her surroundings.

“To see what?”

“It.”

At that moment the Keeper of the Matrix knew what the young girl was talking about. When individuals that came to see the Matrix but didn’t know why they had come to see it would refer to it that was what they called it, It. The keeper knew they could not go against the Matrix if it were leading someone to it. Before allowing the young girl in they asked, “Do you know your parents’ names so that we may notify them that you’re here?”

“I don’t have parents.”

Her response startled the Keeper for a minute. They then began to lead the girl into the Matrix, “Might I have your name to record that you’ve been here?”

“Ora.”

The keeper let the girl into the Matrix chamber then quickly ran back to their desk. The Lungbarrows and Oakdowns had to be notified. The keeper did not have a doubt in their mind as to who she was, it was logical that the Matrix would bring her here. While they had been individually looking for the girl who had been known as Aurora Oakdown, Arcadia had been on alert and looked as well. And finally, after three thousand one hundred and seventy five years, Aurora had been found.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, feel free to be judgmental of this in the comment. A majority of this was written at 3 am when I didn't want to write an essay for class. But hey, we're in the final stretch here! Two chapters left and we're done! I can't really give you a date as to when I'll be uploading the final two chapters but I can say that hopefully it will be done by the end of next week.
> 
> Cheers and Stay safe ya'll!  
> Loki


	16. Love of My Life

The Keeper could not get a hold of the Elya Oakdown. They sent the messenger instead. That messenger ran like mad through the streets to the home of Elya. As they ran through the streets, others began to follow. While Arcadia was never truly quiet, but it came alive in a moment’s notice at the sounds of the gathering crowd. While many had only ever heard the story of Koschei Oakdown and his missing daughter they all felt a duty to do what was right and find her. Yet, in the end, it was not they that needed to find her. It was her that had come to them.

When the messenger finally reached Elya's home they were followed by what must have been a crowd of at least fifty Arcadians. The messenger banged on the front door with a solid fist, knowing that the sound would carry and echo through the home. As the crowd behind them fell silent, the Messenger listened for the woman inside. They could hear a light commotion that preceded the door opening not long after. It was not every day that Elya was greeted with a hoard of individuals at her front door.

Confused, she asked the Messenger, “Yes?”

Now suddenly at a loss for words, the Messenger could only think to do one thing. They grabbed her hand and ran with her behind them all the way back to the Matrix. Someone else could close the door. Elya, who most assuredly hadn’t been expecting to be dragged out of her home and to the Matrix at any hour of the day, followed with seemingly little choice. She could hear a joyous commotion building up in not only the crowd that had followed the Messenger but bubbling up in the people that had begun to leave their homes. Individuals and people lined the streets all around her, much to her confusion, seeing people out in such a way was usually reserved for the warm summer months. Her confusion had struck her in such a way that Elya felt as though her mind had gone blank for a time. When she suddenly realized that she was in front of the Matrix library everything made sense: the Messenger at a loss for words, Arcadia suddenly overjoyed, crowds of people following her and the Messenger around, and a liveliness that would have been subdued this time of year. Aurora had been found and for the first time in as long as she could remember, Elya cried tears of joy.

\---

Inside the Matrix itself, the little girl was exploring the memories and histories that the Matrix had chosen to show her. What struck her most, for a little girl of only five, was that she did have a family. The Matrix kept showing her a man, who was occasionally a woman, that felt familiar enough that he must have been related to her. When the Matrix chose to show her the man and a little girl that looked like her she knew that he must have been her father. Why else would he have been so distraught when she was taken away. The individuals that took her she recognized as people from the lab they kept her in. There was a blonde haired man that would show up with Papa in the Matrix as well, he even stayed around when Papa and him looked different. Sometimes they fought and sometimes they helped each other. One time Ora had run away from the lab and managed to hide for three days before they found her. In those three days she had happened upon a place filled with old books, she hadn’t known what it was called but she liked it there and that was where she remained until they found her. She had found one book that was a story, a really old story, that was about something called a Lungbarrow and something called an Oakdown. In it there was a talk about something called love, which she had never heard of. The book detailed how love was joyful and happy, that the hearts would react to another person all on their own, but that it could also be very sad and lonely at times. 

When Ora was in the Matrix watching who she assumed was her Papa and the other man both felt happy to see each other, joyful at times even, but sometimes they both felt sad. And they were both so very lonely. One of the lab technicians had always told Ora that she was incredibly clever for her age, more so than she should have been. If Papa and the other man were happy and joyful and sad and lonely around each other then they must have loved each other. Ora could remember one of the lab people, a lady with long black hair that was always braided back and dark eyes mentioning that she had a wife and son. Maybe the other man was Papa’s wife, that would make him Mama then. 

The Matrix began shutting Ora out of other memories that had been logged and once she saw the room she had been brought to again she left and tried to go back and find the person that had been at the front. When she exited the Matrix chamber and arrived back at the front she saw the individual who had greeted her as well as two others. She had seen the lady with her Papa in the Matrix. Before Ora knew what was going on, the woman walked over to her and kneeled down to her level. Ora didn’t know who the woman was but she knew that she didn’t feel like Mama did so she couldn’t have been a new face of Mama’s.

“Hello there,” the lady moved one of Ora’s long dark curls away from her face. “I don’t know if you remember me or not but, I’m your Aunt Elya.”

Suddenly Ora felt very shy and wished she could hide out in the corner away from everyone. She didn’t know what an Aunt was but she thought that maybe it was a title of some sort. People at the lab had had titles. The lady seemed very nice but she didn’t know who she really was so Ora dropped her head to avoid eye contact, “Hello.”

Elya, who had had quite a lot of experience with Aurora when she had still been with Koschei knew that the easiest way through to her niece was through food. While the girl might not have actually been five any more, she still looked and seemed to act like she was. “I’ve been talking with the Keeper here and they said that it was alright if you’d like to come home with me for a snack. And while we’re there we can call someone who would very much like to meet you, little one. How’s that sound?”

Ora looked up at the individual she assumed to be the Keeper, the one who had greeted her first, and they gave her a kind smile. She hadn’t gotten a feeling from any of them that they were trying to harm her but instead that they wanted to help her. This mysterious ‘Aunt Elya’ seemed nice. Gingerly the young girl took Elya’s hand and was led back the way that the woman had come to a quaint little house that had brightly colored mosaics adorning its tiled face. She was led inside with the promise of snacks which the young girl was quite looking forward to.

\---

It was just outside the city limits that the blue police box appeared. The air inside the Tardis was tense as the tensions had been growing the longer they kept on going looking for the girl. But, with finally arriving in Arcadia there was finally a sliver of hope that none of them could dispute. Jack, Graham, Ryan, and Yaz were first to exit the Tardis after Theta had discreetly told them that she wanted to talk privately with Koschei for a moment. As the months had drawn on she could visibly see the toll it had been taking on him, and it was in times where they all thought that there was little to no hope that Theta feared that the Master might return and Koschei would be forced to hide in the back of his mind once more. 

Koschei was walking towards the doors of the Tardis when Theta stopped him. She had gently grabbed his hand and held it as her way of telling him to stop. This body wasn’t one that was really for being touched but she had come to accept it as she had come to learn that Koschei’s latest incarnation craved physical contact and affection above almost anything else. He turned back around to her slightly. “Hey, everything is leading right back here. We’ll find her, Koschei. I promise with all my hearts that we’ll find your daughter.”

He had been remembering more and more over the past few months and it was in those times when he thought of Aurora that Theta felt more helpless than ever before. With many of his memories he had been able to ask her if they were real or not, she had to leave him in the dark about the majority of what involved Aurora. She was constantly cursing her younger self and his jealousy for distancing himself from the pair. Theta had only ever seen Aurora once when she was just a few weeks old, it was then that Theta had given Koschei the broach that Missy had worn frequently. After that she hadn’t seen Koschei until after Aurora had been taken. 

Koschei looked away downtrodden and mumbled under his breath.

“What?” Theta asked. This body was constantly on the move and bouncing off the walls but she was glad that she had finally been able to handle being patient. She tried to catch his eye again.

Koschei took a deep breath before looking back up at her and saying,  "I don't know how long you intend to keep me around-"

Theta couldn't help but but in, "Now that I finally have you, I'm not letting go." It had become part of a quiet daily ritual between the two of them, to tell each other that they loved the other. But, no matter how many times she reassured him that she loved him or that she wasn’t going to pass over him when she came across someone she might have thought was better he was still unsure of it all. Theta had loved him for thousands of years, really longer than either of them could remember, and he had always loved her. There was no High Council now to keep them apart.

Koschei smiled at her before continuing, "But if you want to stay for the long hall, she could be our daughter." Theta hoped that it had finally hit him that she had made the decision and wasn’t planning on going anywhere. 

Before she knew what was happening, Theta felt that warm bubbly feeling building up in her chest. A few times in the past few months she had thought of Aurora as their daughter but it had always been a passing thought. Theta smiled at him before placing a light kiss on his lips. She felt him smile against her and one of his hands come up to cup her face. 

_ Contact,  _ she felt him ask in her mind.

Her response was willing and immediate,  _ Contact. _

__

_ I love you.  _ That was how Koschei had taken to telling her that he loved her when he thought others might hear. 

_ I love you too. _

__

They broke contact, both mentally and physically, slowly as they heard a voice that they both distinctly recognized as Graham’s yell, “Come on love birds” from beyond the Tardis’ closed doors. He had taken to teasing them in the last two weeks that they looked and acted like they were either lovesick teenagers or were stuck firmly in the honeymoon phase of life. Reluctantly the pair exited the Tardis, though not before Koschei kissed Theta again.

Neither had realized it, and the Fam chose not to mention it, but Theta and Koschei walked hand in hand as they led the group into Arcadia. The Fam were all collectively amazed by the snow covered sights of Arcadia. Both Koschei and Theta were surprised at the liveliness of the city that was usually much quieter during the winter times. They hadn’t been in the city long when swaths of people began to crowd them and herd the two timelords towards the Matrix. As everything was spoken in Gallifreyan, the companions were unable to decipher what exactly was being said however neither Theta nor Koschei knew why they were being offered congratulations. The closest reasoning they could make was that they had heard that the pair had been given blessings by both of their heads of houses, but as per tradition no real celebratory events were planned until a marriage contract was finalized and a date was set. If they were to follow tradition there was still another three years before the first words of the contract could even begin to be discussed.

When they had finally reached the Matrix in all of the confusion, the Fam was forced to step back as the Keeper’s Messenger ushered the pair inside. They were both giddy beyond repair so something good must have happened. The joyfulness of the air managed to aggravate the deepest parts of Koschei’s soul and as much as he wished that maybe his Aurora had been found he thought that all of the fanfare had to be for something else. There was no way that all of this was for a lost little girl who had only ever lived in the Citadel. To their joint surprise, the Keeper took one of both their hands and told them to visit Elya Oakdown then everything would make sense. As they said this, however, a large smile crept across their face. With the mention of Elya, Koschei’s spirits began to brighten and he hoped that maybe she had found out what had happened to his Aurora. Theta had to all but forcibly stop him from running out to her right then and there. For as much as Koschei had said in the past that it was always Theta who ran or that he himself was not good at running, he sure did a lot of it nowadays. 

The Messenger led the pair back out and gathered confused companions as well. Onwards they headed to Elya’s home, a path that Theta barely remembered but Koschei knew quite well. As they walked the Messenger managed to fend off that majority of the people following, allowing that it was only Theta, Koschei, and their company that came to the home. Still they knew not what was going on. The Messenger knocked upon the door and a voice that could have only belonged to Elya rang out inside. She was quick to open the door for them, allowing the six visitors into the front entrance but no further yet. In all the excitement she forgot that the translation matrix would not work on Gallifreyan so there was much confusion that befell the companions as she told the two timelords to wait but a moment. Before anything further could be asked, the woman was off and had disappeared back into the house. Koschei, who had never known his sister in any incarnation to be so jumpy, was thoroughly confused by her demeanor. 

When Elya had returned to them, after they had all heard the commotion that must have been objects being haphazardly moved around, she brought them further into the home with a smile that shines as brightly as a thousand suns. Bringing them to a quaint little sitting room, Elya had already had a tray of drinks and dainty little treats brought in. She encouraged them all to sit and once they had she left after telling them that she’d be right back. Koschei himself had then gotten up from his seat, favoring instead to stand a bit away from the others.

“Koschei, dear, if you would please close your eyes and your mind for just a moment,” Elya asked from behind the corner. Koschei thought it an odd request but did so anyway as he thought that if his sister could have dealt with him just after regenerating and not killed him then she wasn’t intending to now. As it was just Koschei that Elya had asked to close his eye Theta and the companions were unsure of what exactly they should do as well. Elya peaked her head back around the corner and brought a finger to her lips, gesturing them all to be quiet. She pulled her head back before actually stepping out fully. Elya stood all on her own for a moment before smiling and extending her hand back to the corner. Theta felt as though she would have fallen to the grown had she not been sitting down. A small little hand grasped at Elya’s. With a gentle nudging the little hand became a little arm and before long there was a tiny little girl in front of them all. Elya brought her to stand in front of Koschei.

Beside Ora, Aunt Elya said, “Kosch, you can open your eyes now.”

The little girl, no older than what appeared to be five, looked up at Koschei.  Ora recognized the man in front of her. She had seen him in the Matrix, he was her Papa’s latest face. "Papa?" She asked him timidly. He immediately dropped to the ground and gathered her up in his arms. She snuggled into him as he whispered over and over again "my sweet little baby" and "my darling little girl." All could see now that the High Council had not taken Aurora because they thought Koschei was incapable of loving and raising her, no they had taken her because they wanted to experiment. They had wanted to see what the child of one of their Timeless Children was capable of. Theta could barely hold back her own happy tears as she was hit by an overwhelming wave of emotion coming off of Koschei. She saw, out of the corner of her eye, Elya having to physically brace herself to keep from standing. In what little of Koschei’s voice she could hear Theta knew that he too was crying, not for a lost child but for a found one that he had always and will always love. 

When they broke, Koschei leaned back just a bit to look at her. But the little girl was distracted again. The blonde woman had also been in the Matrix, multiple versions of her with multiple versions of Papa. To her there was only one reasonable explanation for that. If he was her Papa, then the blonde lady was, "Mama?" Koschei moved aside a piece of her black hair that was across her face. When she called Theta 'Mama' however he turned his head to look at her.

_ Contact. _

__

_ Contact. _

__

_ Koschei, this is your call. _

__

Koschei was silent for a moment before the romantic in him decided to start talking.  _ If you really do want me for me, then I would love nothing more than for her to be our daughter. _

__

Theta felt her hearts skip a beat at hearing him call her ‘our daughter’.  _ Our Aurora Oakdown. _

__

She felt his laugh through the bond but saw his smile with her own eyes. The others in the room could not hear what transpired between the pair but saw Theta knelt down to the little girl’s level with a smile that had in fact reached her eyes and then some. They hadn’t heard Koschei tell Theta  _ Aurora Lungbarrow-Oakdown sounds nice _ but they could see that something of the sort had been left unsaid. 

As much as Theta enjoyed the idea of actually being this little girl’s Mama, as she had already been declared as, she couldn’t help but think of her own children back before she had left Gallifrey the first time. The wife she had thought she loved who had left her and the two children that she had come to find out weren’t even hers had hurt her on such a base level that in those early days Theta thought that there was no recovery insight. It made sense now, her then wife had taken one of Theta’s cousins as a lover and their genetic profile had been used when their two children had been loomed. Theta’s genetics were never included in the Lungbarrow loom database, it hadn’t made any sense then but it did now. The High Council must have had a hand in that too, they couldn’t allow any more children of one of their Timeless children until they knew what they could do. She had taken Susan out of spite against her wife since she had seemed to be one of the few individuals that actually liked Theta. 

As all this washed over Theta she seemed to be the last one to notice that she was on the verge of breaking down. It wasn’t until she felt Koschei wrap an arm around her and Aurora try to cuddle close to both of them that Theta realized what was going on. Koschei was still on cloud nine after his daughter had been returned to him and his lover had said she was willing to be a parent towards the girl. Ora, who was learning that there were all sorts of emotions that she had never been exposed to, tried to put her arms around Theta like Koschei had but didn’t know how she was supposed to. She tried to worm her way between Theta and Koschei when both of them brought their arms around her. Ora had read about hugs but no one had ever hugged her, the book said that they felt safe and for the first time in her memory Ora felt truly safe. The little girl decided that she liked hugs very much. 

Unbeknownst to the little girl there were many things going on around her even if it looked like nothing was happening at all. Elya was standing against the wall now grinning at the sight before her. In the past she and her siblings, minus Vespasyan, had talked about how they had needed to find a way to get around the old house rules and find a way that Koschei and Theta could be together. But, in all her years, Elya never thought that maybe one day they’d both have the permission they needed from their heads of house. Neither of them had told her anything yet but she suspected that the three of them were their own little family now and there was no separating them. Theta on the other hand was coming to accept the idea of the little girl in her arms being Aurora Lungbarrow-Oakdown. Many, many, many years ago, back before Theta had ran from Gallifrey or the arranged marriage between her and her wife was even a thought in any Lungbarrow mind, she had toyed with the idea of what it would be like if she could have actually been allowed to marry Koschei. Young Theta had always had his head in the clouds and was always dreaming of something, it wasn’t all that surprising that he’d end up dreaming about Koschei sometimes also. A few times he had even toyed with the idea of a family with Koschei. It had gone as far as Theta wondering what his and Koschei’s kids would be named, but that idea was quickly squashed. She could remember thinking of bringing up the idea of running away with each other not long before that fateful night together, Theta had known that if they had neither of them would have ever been allowed access to any family looms and therefore the planning of names for their future timelord children would be null and void. But now that it was on her mind again, Theta was starting to like the sound of Aurora Lungbarrow-Oakdown. She smiled into the little girl’s hair and leaned her head onto Koschei’s shoulder.

Koschei on the other hand was in the midst of a conversation that was thoroughly freaking out the three twenty first century humans. While Jack had had some psychic training while working at the Time Agency his abilities were nowhere near that of a natural telepath. It took Koschei a second to remember how to bridge the gap to a non-telepathic individual but he remembered how after some thought.

_ Contact,  _ he asked at the group of humans that were not that far from him. He was aiming at talking only to Yaz, Ryan, and Graham but knew that at the moment he was distracted enough that it was likely that Jack could hear him as well.  _ I know this is strange for you but, if you just think of your response and focus it at me I will hear it,  _ he told them all telepathically.

Yaz was the first to try this out,  _ Hello? _

__

_ Hello, Yasmin. _

__

_ Is this how you and the Doctor talk when you don’t want us to hear?  _ There were still times where all of the companions referred to Theta as the Doctor as opposed to her name. They had all been getting better with it over time. 

_ Yes, this is how Theta and I have been talking. But, that is not what I wanted to ask you all about.  _ Neither Graham nor Ryan had attempted telepathic conversation yet.  _ I know that we might not get along that well but, Theta sees you as her family. And as her family I wanted to know how you all felt about being Aunt Yasmin, Uncle Ryan, and Grandad Graham? _

__

Yaz was stunned into silence, and so were the others. While Jack could hear everything that was being discussed, he was not surprised that Koschei hadn’t included him as well. The pair of them were still rockier than Koschei and the other three companions were. Much to the surprise of everyone, Graham made his attempt at speaking telepathically. 

_ Grandad Graham, so long as Theta is alright with that. _

__

Koschei knew that he couldn’t turn his head to smile at them but he actually wished that he could.  _ I do believe that she will be plenty alright with that, Graham. Ryan? Yasmin? _

__

_ If I’m going to be her Aunt, I want to be Aunt Yaz not Aunt Yasmin. I also expect that I’ll be able to see her every so often. _

__

Ryan was the last to but in.  _ Never thought I’d be an Uncle. _

__

_ Do you want to try?  _ Koschei asked him.

_ Grandad Graham, Aunt Yaz, and Uncle Ryan. _

__

_ Thank you,  _ Koschei told them all. 

Koschei was first to draw himself away from the little huddle he found himself in. He hadn’t really wanted to draw himself away from them but he figured that he might as well introduce his Aurora to the extended family that wasn’t made up of Lungbarrows and Oakdowns. Aurora pulled herself away from Theta not long after Koschei had and promptly planted herself on the floor. He knew that he had tears running down his face but Koschei couldn’t find it in him to care. “I should probably introduce myself properly to you,” he told Aurora through tears and smiles. “I’m Koschei Oakdown, I’m your Papa.”

Ora smiled and decided to introduce herself as well, Papa seemed like a nice person to emulate. “I’m Ora.” 

“Ora?” Koschei had never thought of the idea that maybe his Aurora wasn’t called Aurora.

The little five year old gave him a confused look, “Did the lab name me? Did you not know my name?”

Hearing her ask if some lab named her and if he didn’t know her name broke Koschei’s hearts. Theta grabbed his hand as a form of comfort. “I named you Aurora, you were a new dawn for me, but if you like Ora I’d be happy to call you that,” he told her.

“Aurora sounds pretty.”

Theta hugged the girl from behind and told her, “A pretty name just for you if you’d like to take it.” She could tell that words were failing Koschei and hoped that she had managed the right ones for that instance. 

“I like Aurora better than Ora,” the little girl said decidedly.

“Then Aurora you shall be,” Koschei said with a bright smile.

The companions all looked on, not understanding a word of what was being said. However, each of them decided that Gallifreyan sounded like something unique and beautiful. To Jack the language sounded like the waves that would hit the beaches on the Boeshane Peninsula. Ryan decided that Gallifreyan sounded like wind blowing through trees early in the morning, just after the first birds began to chirp for the day. Graham had decided that it sounded like echoes of bells in a great hall, bouncing off the walls and constantly changing. To Yaz the language sounded like life, she could not figure out how to put it into words exactly. But, to her, Gallifreyan sounded like life.

Koschei looked over at them before addressing, “Aurora, there’s a few people that I’d like you to say hello to. Can you repeat after me, hello.” The only word that the companions understood from Koschei was ‘hello’. They all assumed that he was teaching the young girl how to say it in English so that they could understand her.

“El-o,” little Aurora couldn’t quite grasp the first symbol of the word. “El-lo.”

“That’s close.”

Theta marveled at the sight before her. Since she hadn’t seen Koschei with Aurora the first time around, she hadn’t known how exactly he had chosen to teach Gallifreyan but if it was anything like he was doing now she would be happy to watch the young girl grow and learn in the future. She could see that Koschei had been rather hands on with Aurora’s learning the first time around, unlike Theta’s wife had allowed her to be.

“He-l-lo”

If it were even possible, Koschei’s smile grew even brighter. “Now can you put that together?”

“Hello.”

“Perfect,” Koschei stood and took Aurora’s hand. He led her over to the other four while Theta watched from her seat. “These are some of you Mama’s close friends. This is Jack, can you say hello.”

Aurora was not reluctant to say the word in front of the man, Papa had felt safe but Jack felt uneasy to be around. She looked up at Koschei. “I know you might feel a bit confused around him, but Mama and I will teach you how to look around that so you can actually see him, how does that sound?” Koschei asked her.

Aurora nodded her head. “Hello.”

“And hello to you too, little miss,” Jack told her. Aurora had no idea what he said meant. She looked up at Koschei with wide eyes. “We’ll teach you a language that will translate for them in no time,” he told his daughter.

Moving along, Koschei introduced the three other companions all at once. “And these are your Aunt Yaz, Uncle Ryan, and Grandad Graham.”

Aurora assumed that she had to say hello to them too. “Hello.”

If everyone in the room hadn’t been so enthralled by the little girl, they might have noticed Theta cover her mouth in surprise. She hadn’t been expecting Koschei to introduce the three of them as her aunt, uncle, and grandad after Jack had just been called Jack. 

“And this here is Aurora Lungbarrow-Oakdown,” Koschei told them all. Aurora hadn’t understood the beginning of what he said, she thought that it had to have been in the same language that Jack had spoken in, but she had heard her name. She recognized the names Lungbarrow and Oakdown too, they had been in a book she had read. Little Aurora thought that maybe the story was something called a fairytale and therefore maybe she had a fairytale name now too. 

\---

It was all a blur after that, leaving Elya’s and getting back to the Tardis. Both Theta and Koschei could remember promising Elya they’d be back soon to visit but, other than that everything else seemed to blur together. They all had walked back through the streets of Arcadia in what had seemed to be a spontaneous party. Aurora walked between Koschei and Theta taking a hand from each. Theta and Koschei shared a look with each other that said that when they returned they’d look into why Arcadia had decided to suddenly become so lively all of the sudden. They also promised to look into what had happened to Aurora in all those years. What was the lab she had mentioned and why after several thousand years did she still look like she had been taken from Koschei the day before? Them and others were questions that still needed to be answered but both knew that they could wait on them for now. 

When they all returned to the Tardis, the fam had all requested to be dropped off on Earth in the proper era and time. Yaz had reasoned that the three of them needed to be together on their own as a family for a while. Between seeing Koschei over the past three months and the few hours they had been with him, Theta, and Aurora at Elya’s they had all come to the conclusion that that boy meant no harm to any of them. At one point he had even fondly referred to them as ‘his girls.’ When the pair had finally agreed to take them back to Earth, it was Ryan that held them to the same thing that Elya had. They had to promise to come back and visit. Both Theta and Koschei were happy to agree to that, for the first times in their lives they had managed to find a family apart from their own that was accepting of them both and actually wanted to be around them. This was new territory for both of them but they welcomed it with open arms. 

When they arrived on Earth each companion returned back to their normal lives with the hope that they’d soon be seeing Theta, Koschei, and Aurora again soon. Jack had decided to see which other governments had Torchwood or Unit type organizations and went forth to find them. Yaz returned back to her police probationary period and Ryan to his factory job. Graham went home, and to everyone’s surprise, began writing down all the tales of the adventure the group of them had been on. Every single one of them had the dedication ‘To Aurora’ and whenever someone would ask him who Aurora was, he would simply smile.

In all their combined years of travel, neither Theta nor Koschei had ever felt the pull and need to return home to Gallifrey for a more permanent lifestyle. Well, not since they had first left anyway. But with Aurora now that was different. They had taken her to the house that Theta had bought so many years ago, the very same one she had found Koschei and the cyberium in not all that long ago. While the Deca had regularly messed around with the layout of the house, Koschei had wished that they could keep it in a stable orientation and that it be their home whenever they returned to Earth. While Theta had come to love the UK, it was nice to be away sometimes. Theta and Koschei had decidedly taken over Theta’s old room, being the largest, and turned that into their bedroom. Aurora had chosen her room two doors down and much like Koschei had done to Lambda’s room on Gallifrey, he painted the constellation on her walls. After a while though, they did feel the need to return to Gallifrey.

It had been quite a long time since either of them had kept up a permanent residence that wasn’t a Tardis. Like they had on Earth, they had bought a house in Arcadia as well so that Aurora had other little timelords to grow up around. They had also drawn up plans, with their remaining families of course, about what to do with what was left of the Lungbarrow and Oakdown estates. 

One night as Theta and Koschei lay in bed in their Arcadian home, Theta felt an arm curl around her. This was not out of the ordinary, she was quite used to Koschei curling up next to her at night nowadays. He placed a light kiss on her cheek before asking, “Theta, is this real or not?”

Theta smiled and told her husband, “Yes, Koschei, this is very real.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just an epilogue left and we're done! Ahhh!
> 
> Since I haven't really done this before, feel free to leave your full thoughts and comments on this one or the last, I've been really curious recently about what you guys have been thinking about this whole thing.
> 
> As always though, stay safe.
> 
> Cheers!  
> Loki


	17. Epilogue: Lily of the Valley

It was a bright summer day that May morning; birds out and flowers in bloom. They had all agreed on the date the last time they'd met. That last time the humans had seen them was just under a year ago, it had been eight for the timelords. The last time they all met had been June 27th, 2036. Last time they'd met, Ryan had still been a newlywed and Yaz had a partner of her own. Neither had brought up marriage, they were content with just being. And Graham, oh Grandad Graham, had been content in being just that, a grandad. He hadn't watched Ryan growing up so he never had the chance to post photos of him on the fridge at each and every milestone, he had, however, watched Aurora and the others grow up. Graham had always carried photos of them in his wallet and was always wanting to show them off to his old bus driver friends. When they'd ask whose kids they are, he'd tell them they were his daughter's and her husband's. And he was always glad that, so it seemed, every time they visited there was a new one to meet. The last time the three humans had met with their dear Theta and Koschei, it had taken some time for them to finally come around and like him, little Electra had just been loomed. She had been just two months old when she had been introduced to her human family. The tiny little girl was the fifth of the Lungbarrow-Oakdowns, or the O'barrows if you asked Arcadia, and had been the apple of everyone one’s eye. Seeing the little girl had been an absolute joy for everyone, much like the others had all been as well.

Each meeting date had been pre-agreed upon, once a year for the humans. The first gap however was back in the beginning when Theta and Koschei were still figuring out how to be parents to Aurora. Sadly, the young girl had had many hardships to overcome but her parents were willing to do what they needed to in order for her to thrive. First had been taking up more of a permanent residence in Arcadia so that she had others like her to be around. Still though the pair had yet to figure out how she managed to not look older than five at the time they had found her despite still being on what looked to be her first body and missing for several thousand years. Their only reasoning that made sense to them was that she was biologically Koschei’s daughter in ways Theta’s children hadn’t been. The girl had been loomed with his DNA, the pure DNA of a Timeless Child was half of her and she hadn’t had any of the modifications that other timelords had. That was until quite a few decades later and both Theta and Koschei had decided that they wanted a child that was entirely them as well as a sibling for Aurora.

_ Seven Earth Years Previously _

They had reverted back to using the names Theta and Koschei permanently and chose to take both house names, Lungbarrow-Oakdown. Between the seventy years of progress that her previous incarnation and Missy had made, their hundred and fifty in their current incarnations, the months it took for Theta to help Koschei entirely piece his mind back together, and for the pompous timelords to be gone it was almost unimaginable the place they had managed to get to. The last time they had been this comfortable around one another, understanding, and willing to communicate was when they were still at the Academy. In the years since they had been married by Earth law there was but only a handful of days where the pair almost made it back to their old ways. Those days were now, hopefully, far behind them. Now they both had two reasons to be happy and cheerful, both feelings that Koschei had trouble expressing occasionally after oppressing them for so long. 

Koschei stood at the console of Theta's Tardis soaking up the warm golden light. He waited for his wife for their promised visit to an old friend of hers. Even still, Yasmin Khan still lit up when she saw Theta, whom she still occasionally called the Doctor out of habit. A smile spread across his face as his entire world walked into the room, Theta with their daughter Columba Lungbarrow-Oakdown held snug in her arms. The little girl had only been taken from the loom not four weeks ago but she was already the center of his whole universe.

"I think it's time that Little Miss meets her Auntie Yaz."

Koschei set a kiss on top of the little girl's rich auburn hair and another on Theta's cheek. "As you wish, my love." He set the coordinates for Sheffield. Once set he looked back at his little family to see Theta looking completely awestruck at their child. It was a look he was familiar with, both seeing it and expressing it himself. In the weeks since they had finally been able to take their daughter from the loom it was an ever present expression on Theta's face. The girl had turned out to look like a perfect blend of the two of them with one trait that Theta had always hoped for but had yet to have, red hair. For the first day or so they had thought she had just had dark brown hair until the Tardis got fed up with them and changed the lights just enough for the pair to see its dark red hue. 

Theta had just passed little Columba to her father, who had taken to always holding her against his hearts, when the storm that was Aurora came bounding into the room as well. Seeing what the universe had to offer had been a major improvement for Aurora and the girl was now acting the age she looked. While on Gallifrey they did not have hurricanes, they did have them on Earth. Aurora had taken to love visiting Earth and now the Oncoming Storm had a ‘Little Hurricane’, as Arcadia had taken to calling her, to watch over. 

The couple’s human family had been elated to meet the little girl, whom Aurora had thrown aside her beloved bear in favor of holding. All had smiled and awed at the girl when she had her sister set in her arms. For the three days the family had spent on Earth, there was barely a moment where tiny little Columba wasn’t held in someone’s arms. While the humans had been elated to meet the little girl, none of them could say they were entirely surprised that they’d decided to have her.

_ Present Day Earth _

__

__ Theta and Koschei were followed around by a whole gaggle of time tots this time around. Aurora, whom they had decided must have been sent from the great beyond, was making her attempt to wrangle up her younger siblings before they landed in Sheffield. The girl, who now appeared to be eighteen or so, had been fine with one or two younger siblings but was now very much ready for her parents not to have any more kids for a while. Including her, seven was enough in her mind. If you asked her, her and Columba had been enough. She was just hanging onto the thread now that hopefully they’d stop for a while. 

Much like he had been with any of his other children, Koschei had taken to piloting a Tardis with a baby held close to him. He knew that the sight would have likely given any of his instructors at the Academy heart attacks. But he couldn’t help it. There was always something that had been absolutely memorizing to him about each of the kids, be it that they were loomed and they had an idea of what they might look like or had been born instead. Neither him nor Theta had planned for any of their children to be born as opposed to loomed but, he’d be damned if he said he didn’t love them just as much. While he and Theta had intently had their son Vega, who was currently being held by his mother, loomed their youngest daughter wasn’t as planned. Well neither were the twins but, they were now running around like little maniacs. Arcadia as a whole was probably happy that the two little boys would be away with their family for a short while. Said little girl was currently being held close to her father. Koschei had been finding it difficult in the few weeks since she had been born to put down the little girl. There was something about her that reminded him of a baby Aurora, more so than any of her siblings had. She looked like a miniature version of him but he could already tell she’d have a personality as bright and bubbly as her mother’s. Unlike all the others had been, the little girl was quiet. She was so very, very quiet. Aurora had been too.

Absolutely entranced by his youngest daughter, Koschei hadn’t noticed his wife had parked the Tardis in Sheffield until all the other children had gone quiet. That had been their parents’ threat, if you’re not on your best behavior then you don’t get to see your ‘Earth Family.’ Theta had called her trio, back when there had just been the three, that once and it had stuck. Neither parent knew, though, how many members of their chosen human family they’d be meeting on arrival. Theta was the first to make a move towards the door. She adjusted Vega in her arms as her daughter Electra grabbed at her coat as she stumbled. “Be careful, darling,” she told the young girl.

While Electra had chosen to go with her mother, the rambunctious boys, Hadar and Indus, followed their father. Every remaining member of the Deca who had met the pair compared them to a young Theta and Koschei with their equally rambunctious nature. Their two oldest girls stayed a bit back, away from the chaotic scene before them. At times Columba agreed with her older sister in the idea that their parents should have just stopped with her. The girls did follow close behind their parents to Grandad Graham’s home, it was also them that knocked on the door. Grandad Graham opened the door with as much of a warm welcome as one could muster up. Lunch had already been set, today it would just be the Gallifreyan family as well as their human relatives. They’d be meeting all the others the next day. 

All collected in the main living area, adults on chairs and sofas while children opted for the floor instead. Indus, who had instantly taken to his Uncle Ryan, was sat at the older man’s feet and talked on and on about what the teachers had recently gone over in school. School in Arcadia was not as rigid as the education of children in the Citadel. And, both Electra and Hadar choose their Aunt Yaz to be near. Aurora and Columba sided with their Grandad over their parents. All three patiently awaited their turns to hold the two new time tots. Koschei passed Yaz Tucana, the younger of the pair, as Theta passed Ryan little Vega. 

“He’s adorable,” Ryan said whilst Yaz was still too entranced by her niece to speak. Little Tucana had grabbed onto her thumb and refused to let go, Yaz was frozen in awh.

As human age appearances went, the children all looked to be eighteen or younger. Aurora, being the oldest, looked to be around eighteen with Columba falling somewhere around fifteen. The twins, chaotic as ever, looked to be twelve or thirteen depending on who was talking. Electra actually looked her age of eight years old, her aging had only just begun to slow down. If it counted for anything, Vega and Tucana looked their ages as well but they were both only five months loomed and six weeks old respectively.

And so, the day went on. Graham got to hold both of his new grandchildren as Ryan and Yaz got to hold the other child as well. Ryan had also promised his wife would visit tomorrow on her day off and Yaz’s longtime girlfriend would be joining as well. What excited Theta most was that her old friends Martha and Mickey would be coming up as well with their son. For her it had been one big family reunion recently, they’d run into Clara and Me recently as well. Graham had been adamant to get new photographs of the little ones for his collection and they had all discovered that Vega was quite enamored by the lilies of the valley that grew in the garden. When it was finally time to leave, after the next date had been set and the pair assured them all that there were no plans for any new children on their next trip, they all set off. It had been a wonderful few days as it always was. The only issue was that Mickey had decided to show Aurora and Columba Star Trek and now both Theta and Koschei wouldn’t hear the end to the girls’ argument that their Tardis flight test sounded more like the Kobayashi Maru as opposed to the Gallifreyan equivalent to Earth’s drivers test. That was the only issue they had with the visit. 

When all the children were in bed, however, Koschei made a single request whilst they were in deep space between Earth and Gallifrey. “Before we arrive in Arcadia, there’s a place I want to stop first.” 

“Where?” In the past, Theta might have questioned why he’d want to make a stop but she had watched him grow and come to terms with himself. She knew that he meant no harm now.

“A Mondasian colony ship, at the opening of a black hole, floor 1056, just after I met myself the last time there.”

Theta smiled at him whilst she began to plug in the coordinates, he didn’t need to tell her any dates and times. While he shouldn’t have been able to remember that, the cyberium had messed with his mind enough that he could see what had happened in those two weeks plain as day, “Want to pay Missy a visit?” She said with a light laugh.

“I’d rather give Saxon a hard time,” he flashed back a smile at her. He listened to the Tardis dematerialize on what should have been floor 1056 and not far from where his former Prime Minister self was with his own Tardis. Koschei disappeared back into their Tardis for a moment before returning with Tucana in his arms. “You knew she was going to wake up anyway.”

Theta gave him a disapproving look, it wasn’t that she didn’t trust Koschei with their daughter it was more that she didn’t trust two incarnations of the Master back around their daughter. “I’ll only be a moment, love,” he gave her a kiss on the cheek before exiting.

Walking to, what vaguely felt like his death, was ingrained in muscle memory despite the fact that he’d never walked there before. Maybe it was just one version calling out to another and attempting to draw them closer. He spotted a silver haired head leaning against a pair of doors, the Master had yet to make it into his Tardis. Koschei was just in time. 

“Can’t make it the rest of the way there, stranger?” Koschei said, just loud enough for his former to hear him but quiet enough that it didn’t bother his daughter’s hearing.

“Who are you?” He heard his former spit back, the wound had really set in now.

“I’m you,” Koschei felt a bit smug in his wording.

“She’s upstairs, who are you?” So, the timelines had yet to rewrite themselves, he still remembered being with Missy.

Koschei got closer to him and ended up sitting on the ground across from him. “I told you, I’m Koschei, Koschei.”

His former rolled his eyes but Koschei could tell that it hurt for him to try anything else. “Great, come to tell me it’s time to stand with the Doctor, have you?”

“No, you’d just try and hit me with that screwdriver of yours and I can’t risk it this time around.”

“Why’s that?” The pain could be heard in his voice.

Koschei shifted Tucana in his arms before instructing the Master, “For a moment, stop holding your side. Now put your arms out.”

Reluctant as ever, he had just been stabled by his successor; he didn’t want to trip fate again. The Master obliged and held out his arms. In one delicate motion, Koschei set Tucana in his arms. He could tell that Aurora had crossed his mind at that moment. Koschei could barely remember this himself. “Who’s is she?”

“Ours, and Theta’s. She’s our youngest and her name is Tucana.” Koschei knew that this would have been enough to later push Missy towards redemption. He reached around to his pocket and pulled out a small cameo brooch of dark star alloy. When he could tell that the Master’s arms were growing too weak and regeneration was setting in, Koschei took back his daughter. “Take this, it’s from Theta,” he handed his former the brooch. “And remember to give Theta a hard time.” While outwardly the Master had always called Theta the Doctor, they had always thought of them as Theta in the privacy of their own mind. “I think an army of Cybermen will do the trick,” Koschei smiled at his former. He got up as the doors to his former’s Tardis opened, “Oh, and one more thing. Welcome to the Sisterhood.”

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well this has been a trip. One hundred and two pages later, we are finally done! Also, I have a crazy new found respect for those who can write multiple fanfics at once, I could never. As always, please critique at will in the comments. Critiques from you guys now will help with any future ones.
> 
> And, if you've ever noticed that I always have timelords or timelord spelled without capitalization there's a reason behind it. They're pompous assholes and I don't feel like acknowledging them with any proper noun. We don't respect timelords as a whole in this house, only the ones we like. 
> 
> Cheers and Stay Safe!  
> Loki

**Author's Note:**

> This is my foray back into fictional writing. I haven't done any writing that wasn't a political essay or a college assignment in two years so if there is anything you'd like to point out go ahead. Also, if you wish to critique go ahead, I'd encourage it really!
> 
> If you really want to come bug me (and since I'm essentially on full lockdown now) on Tumblr or Instagram I'm @fetchmeabook on both of them! Imma be stuck around a limited number of people for a decent amount of time so feel free to leave me an ask on tumblr or direct message me a hello on either! It would be very helpful for my sanity.
> 
> Cheers!  
> Loki


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